O Caledonia

＂Originally published in Great Britain in 1991 by Hamish Hamilton Ltd.＂--Title page verso.

Elspeth Barker was born in Edinburgh in 1940. In her career as a novelist and journalist, she wrote for The Independent, The Observer (London), The Sunday Times (London), London Review of Books, and many others. Elspeth also taught Latin at what she describes as a naughty girls’ school on the Norfolk coast and worked as a tutor and lecturer in creative writing at the Norwich School of Art and Design. She published her first novel, O Caledonia, at the age of fifty-one. O Caledonia was awarded the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize. Barker is the widow of the poet George Barker and lives in Norfolk.

Maggie O’Farrellis the author of the #1 Sunday Times (London)bestselling memoir I Am, I Am, I Am and eight novels, including The Distance Between Us, which won the Somerset Maugham Award; The Hand That First Held Mine, which won the Costa Novel Award; Instructions for a Heatwave, shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award; This Must Be the Place, shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award; and Hamnet, winner of the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction, the 2020 NBCC Award for Fiction, the 2020 Waterstones’ Book of the Year, and was the Fiction Book of the Year at the 2021 British Book Awards. She lives in Edinburgh.