Chrissie and Rachel Anne now live on the mainland after the Island was evacuated so Rachel feels a desperate need to learn about where she has come from. I absolutely loved Elisabeth Gifford’s last book The Good Doctor of Warsaw, so I approached her latest novel with eager anticipation; I was not disappointed. Sadly, in 1930, the community almost starved when they were cut off by terrible storms and the island was abandoned. It wasn’t long before many of the old ones and the children faded away from TB or from broken hearts, among them my grandmother.

The Lost Lights of St Kilda by Elisabeth Gifford | Waterstones

Every now and then you get a book which you can’t put down but also don’t want to finish as you know that the next thing you read will probably be a disappointment.It is a compelling love story, I couldn't help but want Fred to be happy and for it all to work out for him. THE archipelago of St Kilda — the westernmost islands of the Outer Hebrides — lies about 100 miles west of mainland Scotland in the Atlantic Ocean. When Fred Lawson takes a summer job on St Kilda, little does he realise that he has joined the last community to ever live on that beautiful, isolated island. She’s a plucky young girl when we meet her and her narrative describes among other things her fondness for the laird’s son.

The Lost Lights of St Kilda | Elisabeth Gifford - NetGalley The Lost Lights of St Kilda | Elisabeth Gifford - NetGalley

Established in 2011 and based in Edinburgh, Polaris Publishing Ltd are immensely proud to publish award-winning works by world-class authors. Yet as she must dedicate her life to St Kilda to ensure her family and community’s survival and he is a Cambridge undergraduate, their lives are worlds apart. It is his attempt to escape the Germans, flee France and remember his lost love of St Kilda that comprises his 1940’s story. Although a misunderstanding meant that he lost contact with Chrissie after that summer, he never forgot either her or the summer he spent on the island and in 1940, when he is a prisoner of war behind enemy lines in France, his memories of that time, and of the woman he had loved and lost, become ever more vivid.

A second-chance love story set against the backdrop of WWII, with flashbacks to 1927 on the isle of St. The story opens with Fred, a prisoner of war courtesy of the Germans, following his capture at St Valery. In the course of his travels, he uncovers the devastating truth about the choice that he made on St Kilda more than a decade earlier. Chrissie lives on the Island of St Killda which is incredibly isolated and poor: the dwindling number of residents live off the land and rely on boats from the mainland which come infrequently with supplies and post.

The Lost Lights of St Kilda: author interview with Elisabeth The Lost Lights of St Kilda: author interview with Elisabeth

At another, it is a melancholy ode to a unique landscape and a lyrical lament for a lost way of life. Following a daring escape he faces a dangerous journey across occupied territory to reach a neutral country and freedom. The intense devotion the families have for their children who are precious, because so many have died as infants. The narrative cuts back and forth between the three locations, but Gifford’s heart is clearly in St Kilda, and the wartime escape story seems almost perfunctory by comparison. Much of what they wove in tweed or grew on the crofts went for rent to the island owner, the laird of Dunvegan, who was also their link to the mainland a hundred miles away.My actual Irish family history is lost, as all records were blown up in the Easter rising and as poor famine immigrants, nothing written survives from my great grandparents who came over from Dublin.