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Sunday, June 08, 2014

Kate Hewitt: The Emigrants Trilogy

This month marks the release of the third volume in my historical Emigrants Trilogy, based on the lives and letters of my ancestors. It’s been a long time coming, because I wrote the first volume, Far Horizons, in 2001.

Far Horizons is the most true-to-life of the three books; it was inspired by the letters exchanged between my great-great-great aunt and uncle. Allan MacDougall asked Harriet Campbell to marry him in 1819, on the eve of his departure for Canada from Scotland. This meant he was asking Harriet to wait for his return sometime in the future, and when his father learned about this he felt it was dishonorable and forced Allan to set Harriet free, although he pledged to remain constant himself. It would be seven long years before they were reunited, and Far Horizons is about what happened while they were apart.

One of Allan’s letters that has been passed down through my family begins with the sentence: ‘How can I account for the long silence on your part…’  and I was intrigued by it, wondering why Harriet had not written. Far Horizons imaginatively answers that question!


The following two volumes in the trilogy, Another Country and A Distant Shore, depart from family history as I take the MacDougall and Campbell families to far-flung places, from Boston to Hong Kong to Burma. It’s been great fun writing their stories, and although the trilogy is complete I foresee more Emigrants books in my future!

I hope you enjoy the trilogy. Do you like books that are based, even loosely, on real events of people?

Happy Reading,


Kate

2 comments:

dstoutholcomb said...

these sound wonderful

dstoutholcomb said...

and, I do like fact-based fiction stories.