PUBLISHERS FIGHT FOR RIGHTS TO AUTHOR’S BOOK
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Steve Hendry When Sandra Ireland was starting work at 6am as a shop cleaner, her dream of being a writer kept her going through the cold early starts in winter.
Now she’s real ly cleaning up thanks to an international bidding war over the rights to her latest book.
The y have been sold to two blue- chip publishing houses – Simon & Schuster in the US and Penguin in Germany.
Despite the buzz around Bone Deep, S a nd r a , 5 6 , a divorced mother of two from Carnoustie in Angus, said her previous employment is never far from her thoughts.
She said: “It is incredibly exciting and I ’ m very humbled and grateful for all the attention I am getting just now. There’s a real buzz about it. “I did cleaning for s e v en years in my local shop. It was an interesting journey. It got me in the rhythm of
getting up early but
It’s a tale of love and murder which intertwines the past and present as its central characters collect local folk stories for a book.
One of the inspirations for the book was The Cruel Sister, a Border ballad collected by Sir Walter Scott, while another was Barry Mill in Angus, one of the last working watermills in Scotland.
She said: “I was working there, volunteering for a couple of years as a tour guide, so I had to put a bit of sparkle into my tours and I used to concentrate on the folklore aspects of it, like the old millers used to believe they had a sort of personal kelpie that would protect their mill.
“So things like that made me think I would love to use this as a setting for a book. But the actual ballad of The Cruel Sister or The Two Sisters was in a book I had since I was a teenager. I happened to be f licking through it and
something just caught my
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Bone Deep is out now, published by Polygon.