Saraband

A novel based on the shocking true eighteenth-century story of a Scottish noblewoman whose own husband faked her death and exiled her to a remote island, where she could never be found.

Edinburgh, January 1732. It’s the funeral of Rachel, wife of high-ranking aristocrat Lord Grange, whose unexpected death has shocked the mourners.

But Rachel is, in fact, very much alive. She has been brutally kidnapped and her death has been faked—by her own husband. Whether punishment for being “too feisty for a lady” and not submissive enough for a wife, or to cover up his treasonous Jacobite leanings, or simply to replace her with his long-time mistress, he has banished Rachel to a remote and barren island. There she will be subjected to a life of hardship and loneliness, unable to speak the islanders’ language, far from her beloved children and without hope of being found.

Lady Grange has until now been remembered only by her husband’s unflattering account, but this novel reveals events from the perspective of the real Lady Grange. At last, centuries later, her story is reclaimed.