Orkney Twilight (41 page)
Authors: Clare Carson
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Acknowledgements & Author’s Notes
An invitation from the publisher
I am hugely grateful to my brilliant agent Oli Munson, and to Laura Palmer and everybody at Head of Zeus for their fantastic guidance and support. Thank you to Rosy, Sal, Mary, Bill and Katy for their friendship when I needed it. Thank you also to Shiona and everybody I work with for being so enthusiastic. Special thanks go to my mother for her wisdom and encouragement. And, above all, thank you to Andy, Eva and Rosa for being my bedrock.
I culled information about the Vikings from a number of sources, including
A History of the Vikings
, published by Oxford University Press in 1968, and Neil Price’s ‘Sorcery and circumpolar traditions in Old Norse belief’, in
The Viking World
, edited by Stefan Brink in collaboration with Neil Price, published in 2008 by Routledge. I used Seumas Milne,
The Enemy Within. The Secret War Against the Miners,
published in 2004 by Verso, for background information about turf wars between MI5 and Special Branch during the miners’ strike. Tom Zoellner,
Uranium. War, Energy, and the Rock that Shaped the World
, published in 2009 by Penguin Books, provides an excellent account of uranium mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The long-running anthropological debate about the ‘skipper effect’ – the theory that successful skippers are less technical experts than magicians who can persuade other fishing boats to follow them – is explained by Thorddur Bjanason and Thorolfur Thorlindsson in their 1993 article, ‘In Defense of a Folk Model: “The Skipper Effect” in the Icelandic Cod Fishery’, in
American Anthropologist
, volume 95, number 2, pp. 371–94. Claude Lévi-Strauss points to the mythical appeal of carrion birds in his 1955 article, ‘The Structural Study of Myths’ in
The Journal of American Folklore
, volume 68, number 270, pp. 428–44. For information about Orkney’s myths and folklore, I went to
www.orkneyjar.com
. All interpretations of the above sources are entirely my own. Thank you to Hodder & Stoughton for permission to reproduce the quote from
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
The following books are mentioned in the novel:
Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry (eds),
Death and the Regeneration of Life,
Cambridge University Press, 1982
James George Frazer,
The Golden Bough. A Study in Magic and Religion
. First published in 1890 in two volumes, in three volumes in 1900, and in 12 volumes between 1906 and 1915. An abridged version appeared in 1922, but this excluded passages about Christianity. The abridged version was republished in 1994 by Oxford University Press with the controversial passages reinstated
James Joyce,
Ulysses,
Sylvia Beach, 1922
Kim Philby,
My Silent War. The Autobiography of a Spy.
The Modern Library. New York, 1968
The Orkneyinga Saga. The History of the Earls of Orkney
. Translation by Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards, Hogarth Press Ltd, 1978
Jim is an undercover policeman with alcohol issues and the gift of the gab – but he never talks about his past. His daughter Sam is a rebellious eighteen-year-old with an inquisitive streak. She is determined to find out the truth about her father.
On holiday in Orkney, beneath an endless midsummer sky, Sam spies on Jim as he runs secretive errands across the island. What did he take from the old watchtower on the edge of a cliff? Why is he so interested in Norse mythology? And why does Sam have the eerie feeling that she too is being watched? When Sam finally discovers the truth, it will draw her into a dangerous world of deception and double-dealing... and bring her closer to her dad than ever before.
Set between the streets of south London, and the remote coastlines of Scotland,
Orkney Twilight
is an original, haunting thriller about fathers, daughters and the ghosts of the past.
C
LARE
C
ARSON
is an anthropologist and works in international development, specialising in human rights. Her father was an undercover policeman in 1970s London.
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The story starts here.
First published in the UK in 2014 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Clare Carson, 2014
The moral right of Clare Carson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (E) 9781784080938
ISBN (HB) 9781784080945
ISBN (XTPB) 9781784080952
ISBN (MMP) 9781784080969
Head of Zeus Ltd
Clerkenwell House
45-47 Clerkenwell Green
London EC1R 0HT
Acknowledgements and Author’s Note