O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker
Welcome to this Gothic book review blog. For the first blog I have chosen O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker. This book was first published in 1991 by Hamish Hamilton Publishers. This is a novella, runing to approx 150 pages, which makes it easy to read in one or two sittings. The story is set in the 1940s and 50s in Scotland, partly in Edinburgh and partly in the fictional Auchnasaugh Castle near Aberdeen. The title is taken from lines in The Lay of the Last Minstrel by Walter Scott: O Caledonia! stern and wild, Meet nurse for a poetic child. The poetic child is Janet, and the story opens when she is sixteen, or rather, when she was sixteen, because she is dead, murdered, and lying at the bottom of the s...