"...a real page-turner"

In a new review of Moon in Leo in the May issue of Cumbria Life Magazine, Sue Allan highlights Kathleen's extraordinary sense of time and place: something which many other readers have mentioned as a major strength.

Set in Furness in the period after the restoration of Charles II, Moon in Leo is a novel located so perfectly in time and space that you can feel the chill of the wind across Morecambe Bay, and plot the action in the landscape. Herbert's meticulous historical research, combined with her knowledge and love of the area underpin the novel, but it is her talent as a storyteller that brings alive the tale of Rosamund and her search for truth, and love, in turbulent political times. The peninsula and bay provide a suitably wild and somewhat claustrophobic setting for a real page-turner.

Why would a writer set their story in the past?

Kathleen shows her quality as a writer even in her letters to a teenage girl. The following is an extract from a letter to my daughter in which she discusses Miller's reasons for setting his play about the McCarthy Witch Hunts in the past.  (Click on images below for larger versions).

In a much more recent letter to me she says much the same thing about the relevance of the political and religious turmoil of the closing years of Charles II's reign to today. As she saw more parallels between then and now, so she became more anxious that Moon in Leo should be published....

....during these last weeks, the story has suddenly become incredibly topical- …for the background  we have:

• a King called Charles, with a complicated marital and family life

• a society of the rich and famous who produce a new scandal with every edition of the newspapers

• a government that has been in office for 18 years and is not only stale but starting to smell

• an opposition that is playing the cards of integrity, decency and social conscience but has some background material that would make the usual whoring and grafting sound like the biography of Florence Nightingale

• an established religion that for the time has run out of steam, and numbers of cults that are boiling with enthusiasm- some for good, some for evil, both inside and outside Christianity

• and a large number of “alternative” Englands that are barely suspected to exist by “official” England- some just want to be allowed to live, some would like to smash everything in their way-

It’s 1678, but change the clothes and it could be today. So, now- if ever- it might find a reckless publisher. 

More extracts from Kathleen's letters to come!