If You, Like Me ...

If you, like me, come from New York, November is a dull month, the space between the new season which starts in September and the sparkle of Christmas.  Not much going on except shopping and more shopping.  Not for me.  November 2021 was the month of the double whammy. First, I got a most unexpected email.  It told me I was being honoured as the founder of Kellett School, Hong Kong, by having an annual lecture series named after me. The Elliott Lecture.

I rushed off to get my hair done and tried hard to take a selfie as requested.  Oh yes, I admit it. I’m a tech dummy.  I can scribble half the day on the laptop but anything more sophisticated is rocket science. But I managed it and soon a few documents arrived and I was able to frame them and hang them on the wall of my tiny study in my tiny cottage on the tiny island of Inishbofin in the West of Ireland.

And the second even more exciting November happening, my novel, the one I have been writing for the last forty years, was accepted for publication by Austin Macauley in London.  It came out three days ago on Amazon, print and ebook and will be launched in Belfast this week. Opening that box, seeing all those books with their shiny red covers, the leaflets, bookmarks and postcards with my name on them was a moment I shall remember always.

Love in the Shadow of Mao, I call it.  It’s really a love story although the publishers have designated it an historical novel.  I never thought of it in those terms although it naturally embodies a lot of history being set in a place that has been closed to the Western world for many years.

I had been interested in China from childhood. I remember at about ten years old cooking some sort of instant rice and eating it with chopsticks while reading Pearl Buck’s China novels.  The minute I arrived in Hong Kong in 1975 where my husband had accepted a job, I rushed to the China Travel office to put my name on the list for permission go on a tour.  It was a two year wait but idea of my book was conceived as I walked across the bridge from China back to Hong Kong. 

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