Alison York – Tartan Threads: Serendipity in Scotland
Tartan Threads: Serendipity in Scotland is a fictional story of serendipitous occurrences that transform the characters’ life paths. The book includes aspects of coming of age, adventure, love, grief, relationships, mystery, and time travel by means of a futuristic crystal quartz geode. It is 1978 and Clare Wood is the most unlikely person one would think of as a time traveller. At twenty-one, she has no idea of what or who she wants to be, but she knows she needs to go somewhere and to some place that stretches her as a person. When a series of events convinces her to explore her family’s origins, Clare heads to Stornoway in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. There, an old man, still grieving his young lost love, is about to upend her holiday. It takes all of Clare’s wits and sincerity to survive what happens next.
Content Warning: Tartan Threads contains scenes from World War 1 and 2 but the content is ‘soft’, not graphic, and culturally slanted toward the British perspective during those times. There are conversations of a gruff nature, some swear words that might be felt as inhospitable largely within the war scenes. The reading audience in the author’s view would be rated 14+.
About the Author
Alison has been writing for as long as she can remember.
Her mother instilled in her the love of reading, spelling words correctly, and speaking grammatically (not yeah, but yes!) and looking things up in encyclopedias and dictionaries. Alison’s imagination led her to capturing serious, endearing, and comical moments on paper. Had she her dad’s artistic talent, she would have loved to draw comic strips, often seeing situations in a humorous light. Alison fictionalizes real
life situations or memories of people and places within a myriad of working experiences from across all four Western Canadian provinces. Writing short stories is a favourite past time. She has in the past written literary non-fiction articles at her places of work in the court system, the school system and in her voluntary work in the community. She continues to submit stories to literary magazines and has the sequel to this book started.
Tartan Threads: Serendipity in Scotland, while a fictional story, incorporates memories from her adventures in Scotland when she was the protagonist’s age, twenty. Alison continues to hone her writing craft, gaining knowledge from belonging to her Writer’s Group, the Manitoba Writer’s Guild and various other sources.