(The) Last Year
Deborah: (The) Last Year – the first book of this series
Deborah Heaney is not at ease with her life. She should be happy, she knows, as her situation is privileged. She lives in a gorgeous part of the Scottish countryside and has enough money, having retired from her teaching job, to do what she wants. Her husband John, a GP, and her twin boys, students at university, are all together for the Christmas holidays. She has a doctor’s appointment which delivers a bombshell into her life, a diagnosis which confirms her secret anxiety. She is unwilling to give it a name, having a hatred of illness, and promptly labels it NAA, Nothing At all. She decides to tell no one about this diagnosis. There are two keys bits of information that she takes away from her follow-up hospital appointment on New Year’s Eve:
She should have at least one year with no escalation of symptoms, which are so far very minor.
There is no treatment currently available to slow or eradiate the disease’s progression. Denial is her key strategy.
Finally spring, her friends and her patient husband jolt her out of her withdrawal.
And then she sets out on a time of travel, discovery and adventure, opening her eyes to experiences which connect her to her distant past and then propel her into an unexpected future.
And there’s a doppelganger, of course. And far too much wine. And some dancing too.
Jane: (The) Last Year- book two of this series of women’s stories of crucial years in their lives
Jane lives a pleasant life of relative affluence in Southwest Scotland. She enjoys the freedom to dabble as an artist, producing work that mostly gets given away to friends and relations. She nurtures the creativity of others but she has started to wonder if her time will ever come.
But it all starts changing for Jane when her good friend Deborah becomes seriously ill. And when her familiar hometown begins to feel like an alien place, with the river the focus for some very peculiar experiences that Jane can’t quite fathom.
What does an artist do when someone she loves dies? She makes art, of course.
But for Jane, it’s all extra complicated as her best friend’s death is tied up with Jane seeing strange visions around water. She wonders if she’s losing her mind. But in the end she suspects that she’s been holding on too hard to her sanity. Breaking free, she starts making work that both challenges her technically and allows her to explore the women she cares about in her art. And for the first time, Jane starts to see her life and her world with clarity.
Róisín: (The) Last Year
Róisín finishes 2018 by leaving Upstate New York and jumping on a plane to Scotland. She had been awarded the Alasdair Reid Pamphlet Prize at the Wigtown Book Festival back in the autumn but had been too skint to come to collect it. However, one of the Festival’s Friends invites her to come over for Hogmanay in Kirkcudbright in Southwest Scotland, all expenses paid. How could she refuse?
After the holidays, she finds a job in a bakery in Moniaive, a village of creatives, gardeners and musicians, among others. She falls in love with the early morning rises, producing croissants that make her more famous than her writing, and generally learns to live with failing to complete her novel. Plus she works on her lucid dreaming!
Her story connects with some of Deborah’s family and friends. To her surprise, she finds that visiting Scotland has interrupted her future plans, such as they were, and is life-altering for her. Plus she writes some songs!
