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Catriona McCloud
Catriona McCloud has two modern novels out so far. Although they are full of twists and puzzles they are otherwise very different from the Dandy Gilver stories.
Growing Up Again
Janie Lawson tells her husband that she’s leaving, and by the morning she has indeed gone: it’s 1981, she’s fifteen, in her parents’ house, with a bad perm and double physics at nine.
Who wouldn’t love the chance to visit for a day, see old friends and gather more memories? But when the days turn into weeks and the weeks into months, Janie must ask herself the big questions: What is it for? Is she there to have another run at life and get it right this time? To prevent the disasters she knows are coming? And why, if she had to go back, could she not have gone a bit further and arrived in time to save Elvis?
In 1981 (with The King past saving), it could be Tiananmen Square, or Chernobyl, even 9/11, and while she’s at it there’s the upcoming fairytale wedding of Lady Diana Spencer to Prince (it seemed at the time) Charming. Stopping that is easier than you’d think, but closer to home things are not going well. Her father has lost his job, her mother is pregnant, her best friend is an orphan and it’s all Janie’s fault. She only wants to help but the more she tries the worse it gets and soon it seems there’s no one she hasn’t offended, humiliated, defrauded, addicted, evicted, or killed. Elvis, possibly, is well out of it.
- Hardback:
Orion, 10 Jan 2007. ISBN: 978-0-7528-7488-3.
- Paperback:
Reviews
‘Beautifully written with many creative descriptions and metaphors capturing the nuances of human emotion and experience - an excellent example of women’s fiction spiced up with a little metaphysics.’ (Irish Mail On Sunday)
‘An intriguing, quirky drama that never fails to surprise.’ (Daily Record)
‘Full of laughs, with plenty of twists and turns’ (Evening Herald Ireland)
‘A very entertaining story’ (Woman’s Own)
‘One night Janie Lawson decides to leave her husband, Ludo. The next morning she wakes up back in 1981 aged 15. So far, so Jenny Colgan’s Do You Remember the First Time, but Catriona McCloud’s Growing Up Again is a very different, and much better, book.’ (Trashionista)
Straight Up
Verity Drummond is not a writer — she’s a florist — but when her husband, Kim, leaves her she deals with the pain by writing Straight Up, in which a man on a mountaineering expedition dies all alone in a hole in the ice, starving, wretched and with his broken bones poking through his skin.
In LA to meet Jasmine and Patrice who want to adapt Straight Up for the screen, and caught between the dead man up the mountain and an inability to admit that she’s just another divorcee like the rest of California, Verity becomes The Widow and the buzz around the script, now “based on a true story”, begins to grow.
Enter Phil, Kim’s oldest friend, in California studying viniculture in preparation for running his family’s wine business in Cornwall. Phil, perhaps pursuing Verity, definitely being pursued by both Patrice and Jasmine, forces our heroine into the biggest rolling snowball ,the tightest tangled web of her life.
Straight Up is a book about honesty and all the other options: stories, spin, delusions, blinkers, evasion and downright lies.
- Hardback:
- Paperback:
