Saraband

In this memoir of place, memory and motion, Linda Cracknell reels in the hidden lives of the women who went before her, crystallising her connection to them and to the sea.

When Linda Cracknell’s quest to connect herself and her mother to a seafaring family history finds her in a harbour, bracing herself to throw a line, she is struck by the parallel of this physical action to her years-long mission of reeling the past closer to the present, finding her place in a family tree full of mariners and ship-owners, whose lives were defined by the ebb and flow of tides.

She travels the Scottish and South-West England coast – where many of her ancestors lived – by boat and foot; travels on a 121-year-old sailboat; joins a community effort to build and launch a rowing boat on a Highland loch; and lays a family palimpsest in the footsteps of her ancestors across marshes and clifftops. She finds that it is the women in her family who reach across the decades and centuries to catch the line she throws, and begins to understand them more clearly as the linchpins of the coastal communities they lived in, and as the undertow of her own identity. All the while, she is slowly untangling her complex relationship with her own elderly mother.

What begins as a quest for legacy takes her well beyond, as she grows to understand something more elemental and unconscious in her pull to the sea, imagining her blood as salt-saturated, sea-marked.

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.