Sally Magnusson

We cannot wait to welcome critically-acclaimed author and broadcasting icon, Sally Magnusson, to Greenside Church this May to discuss her brilliant new novel, Music in the Dark.

Sally's debut novel, The Sealwoman's Gift (2018), about the experience of a seventeenth century Icelandic woman abducted into slavery, was shortlisted for 6 literary prizes. Sally's third novel delves again into the experience of women on which the historical record is largely silent - this time placing a Victorian washer-woman of low class, despised race, advancing age and brilliant but injured mind into exhilarating light, and exploring the effect of brutal community displacement.

Jamesina Ross is long finished with men. But one night a stranger seeking lodgings knocks on the door of her tenement flat. He doesn’t recognise her, but she remembers him at once. Not that she plans to mention it. She has no intention of trusting anyone enough to let herself be vulnerable again.

A lifetime ago Jamesina Ross was bent on becoming a writer. She had a facility with words. She made up songs about the Highland glen where she lived and the kin who had worked that land for generations. When her community was threatened with eviction, she gave voice to that too. The women stood together, defiant and determined, but Jamesina’s music was no match for one of the most brutal confrontations of the Highland Clearances.

Jasesina has borne the disfigurements of that day ever since, on her face and inside her head. It marked the end of a life of promise and the beginning of a very different one. Her lodger thinks that if she would only dare to open the past, she might have the chance of a future.