Volgens de schrijfster Karen Hawkins (niet de minste hè) is het boek Veil of Time van Claire R. Mcdougall perfect voor liefhebsters van Diana Gabaldon. Toen ik dat las moest ik natuurlijk meer weten over dit boek en over de schrijfster. En inderdaad lijkt dit boek het lezen meer dan waard. De schrijfster is geboren en getogen in Schotland en weet dus waar ze het over heeft. Diepe emoties en intense liefde. Welke keuze zal Maggie maken aan het einde van het boek? Een recensie zei dit:
“Readers will wonder up until the end what choice Maggie will make, and the bittersweet resolution is strangely satisfying. Fans of early medieval Scotland, time travel novels, romance, and possibly medical dramas will like this haunting, debut novel by the Scottish-born McDougall”
Als dat je niet nieuwsgierig maakt dan weet ik het ook niet meer.
Het verhaal:
In the wake of her divorce, Maggie Livingstone leaves her native Glasgow to rent a holiday cottage at the foot of Dunadd, an ancient Pictish hill fort in the Scottish highlands, where the kings of Scotland were once crowned. There she is hoping to find time to herself to finish a post-graduate thesis on the witch burnings she started before her marriage.
But there is too much in Maggie’s past to allow for much peace and quiet: There’s her epilepsy for which a scheduled surgery might be her only chance of “normality;” there’s the recent death of her eleven year-old daughter, Ellie; there’s her teenage son, who left for boarding school when tensions at home became intolerable.
But most of all, there are those vivid dreams Maggie has in the deep sleep after seizures which make her draw only a fuzzy line between waking and sleeping. Dunadd, with its own vibrant history, starts to cross that line, and soon Maggie isn’t sure if she is only dreaming about her forays back to 735AD.
Fergus, the king of Dunadd’s recently widowed brother, certainly seems real enough to be more than a passing interest to Maggie. Sula the druidess paints quite a different picture of the pagan religion than Maggie had understood from her research. And then there is Fergus’s young daughter, who is so like her own daughter, Maggie can’t decide which world she belongs in.
Back in her own time, Maggie discovers in an ancient census that 735 AD was the year of a devastating earthquake at Dunadd. With the date of her surgery fast approaching, Maggie knows she has to get back to warn Fergus to take his daughter and leave the fort, that the era of his family’s rule at Dunadd is about to come to an abrupt end.
Het boek is er in paperback en als ebook.
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