What is forbidden romance? Forbidden romance is a love story in which the love itself is the transgression. The attraction is there from the first page; what the characters cannot do is act on it, because a family, a faith, a profession, a species, a war or their own conscience says no. That prohibition is…
6 min read
What is forced proximity? Forced proximity is the romance trope in which circumstances push two people together and keep them there: snowed in, stranded, sharing a cabin, a cell, a space station or a single bed. There is nowhere to go, so there is nowhere to hide, and the defences that hold perfectly well in…
6 min read
The keening began at midnight, as it always did, and Dr. Declan O’Sullivan, who had been listening to it for three weeks from his rented cottage on the Dingle Peninsula, put down his whiskey and went outside to find the source. He was an ethnomusicologist, specialising in the traditional lament traditions of Ireland, and the…
9 min read
The seal skin was hidden in the chimney of the old croft house on the headland above Achiltibuie, wrapped in oilcloth that had been there so long it had become part of the stonework. Caitriona MacLeod found it on the afternoon she moved in, when the removal of a bird’s nest dislodged a stone that…
11 min read
Maren Solvik had not set foot on Heksholmen in fourteen years, and she had planned to extend that record indefinitely. The island — a spur of black rock jutting from the Norwegian Sea like a clenched fist — held nothing for her but memories she had spent her adult life learning to outrun. The lighthouse….
10 min read
The bells of Saint Elara had been silent for eleven years when Margaux Delacroix arrived to restore them. The church stood at the edge of the village of Briarthorn, where the Somerset levels met the Mendip Hills in a disputed borderland of mist and ancient grievance. It was a building of considerable beauty and even…
10 min read