Showing results by author "Isla Dewar" in All Categories

Charlie Gavin was abducted as a baby. He didn't know who he was or where he came from. His mission was to find himself. And when he did, he decided to spend his life finding other lost souls by opening the Be Kindly Missing Persons Bureau. Martha Walters, his assistant, has had her 15 minutes of almost fame and failed. Now, dealing with her guilt and pain, she lives with her mum and dotes on her young daughter. Charlie appears to be a dreamer, but hey, his office is near her house, she can lie in of a morning and take her kid to school and the work isn't too heartbreaking. Or is it?

Anna and her best friend, George, meet every week to reminisce about their moments of glory over a glass or three of wine. When Anna is asked to look after the boy across the road for a few hours each week, she isn't sure. But she takes the job on, and a child's view of her world shows her a different place. George remembers a flat she stayed in when she ran away from home, and she'd love to see it again.

While her mother regards the Locarno dancehall as a den of iniquity, for 17-year-old shop-girl, Nell McClusky, it’s the centre of the universe. Where else is she going to meet the man of her dreams who’ll take her away from the humdrum realities of life on a council estate in 1950s Edinburgh? At first Alistair Rutherford doesn’t look that promising. He dresses more like a student than Nell’s idol, Buddy Holly.

Izzy has joined the Air Transport Auxiliary and can’t believe her luck. She’s getting to do the thing she loves most: flying. On the ground she is a woman who longs to be independent, but who is lying to her family about the job she does. But, in the thrill of the air, she can be free. Izzy’s heroine is her friend, Elspeth, who, on an impulse, signed on to do her bit as a lumber-jill and has been regretting it ever since.

Obsessively neat Lily, a writer who writes about writers, is asked to interview the enigmatic Rita Boothe, journalist, photographer, self-styled culinary expert, and wit. Sitting in Rita's living room, leafing through a book of photographs from the early '70s, Lily comes across a picture of an incandescently sexy young woman sitting in the back of a limousine, swigging Jack Daniels. It is her mother, Mattie. Lily isn't shocked. She's envious.

"You have to bide your time when you live a life of crime. That's what we discovered when we founded The Cherry Sundae Company. It seemed to us there was only so much money in the world, and some people had too much. Others hadn't enough. You could say we were vigilantes."