Satisfying readable stories with warm hearted heroines are the hallmarks of an Isla Dewar book and you have them all here in A Winter Bride. It's 1950's Scotland and Nell thinks marrying a trainee solicitor from a wealthy family will turn her life around. But life has its own plans as she soon discovers.
A girl, Nell was convinced, should have a good time at seventeen, have met her true love at eighteen, be engaged at nine, and marry at twenty-one. While her mother regards the Locarno Dancehall as a den of iniquity, for seventeen-year-old, shop-girl, Nell McClusky, it's the centre of the universe. Where else is she going to meet the man of her dreams who'll take her away from the hum-drum realities of life on a council estate in 1950s Edinburgh? At first Alistair Rutherford doesn't look that promising. He dresses more like a student than Nell's idol, Buddy Holly. But Alistair comes from a wealthy family and is studying to be a lawyer, two things that mean that Nell soon has plans to leave her dance hall days far behind her. But the reality of marriage is far different to Nell's romantic notions...
Isla Dewar was born in Edinburgh. She wrote articles for magazines and newspapers for many years before she wrote her first novel, Keeping Up with Magda, in 1995. She lives in Fife with her husband, a cartoonist; they have two sons.
