Bøker av Sandy Spencer

History is a murk. Scottish history on which these stories are loosely based is a thick fog on a boggy moor gloomed by craggy mountains. It's a bad dream. I have tried to make some sense of that dream in my own way. If you read these stories-and I hope you will-in search of Facts you will be lost. No one wants to be lost in a thick fog on a boggy moor in Scotland at night. Trust me. You will lose the plot. You will never know where solid Fact leaves off and the bogs of Fiction begin. I'm not even sure myself. But if you let your imagination be your "slew dogge" (you'll get the reference if you take the plunge), you may make it through to the Afterword. I hope you will. As the waiter tending the coffee-bar said to the winterized woman with the mustache who found Greece cold for the time of year: Enjoy. (You'll have to take the plunge for that one too. Sorry)

History is a record of what actually happened. Historical Fiction (capitalised to give it equal heft) is an account of what may have happened. Hilary Mantel, author of a monumental portrayal of the players in France's revolution of 1789, described her work as "documentary fiction guided entirely by facts". In writing my own fictions-LADY WITH A FAN, DREAM AGAIN, BIRD ON THE WING, ANOTHER RUSSIA, and SCATTERED TO THE WIND-Mantel's dictum has been my guiding light. "Le bon roi" Henri Quatre of France certainly was assassinated in 1610. Did his killer act alone? Or was Ravaillac part of a wider conspiracy? History is still unsure; Historical Fiction supplies a final answer.

It starts out on a fancy island-resort; it ends up in one of the most-polluted cities on the planet: Norilsk, Siberia. Ivory-smuggling, arms-trafficking, and massive state-corruption make daily headlines; WHITE GOLD gives those headlines a terrifying human face. Carter French, a young Scotsman with a patchwork past and an uncertain future, is drawn into a deadly game in which he plays the pawn.Carter's perilous journey leads him from the golden sands of Massachusetts, to the dangerous streets of New York's Chinatown, and on to the remote Baltic island of Fårö. There Carter must confront his past and make a final choice: Should he throw in his hand or risk everything on a high-stake gamble that might finally lead him home?