Billie’s Kiss

Description

Title: Billie’s Kiss
Author: Elizabeth Knox
Publisher: Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2002
Format: Paperback
Condition: Very Good

Description:

It begins with a kiss. And a leap across cold, dark waters.

Spring 1903. A ship explodes as it docks at Stolnsay harbour on the remote, divided Scottish island of Kissach and Skilling — one half Catholic and facing Ireland, the other Protestant and facing Scandinavia. Many drown. Among the survivors is Billie Paxton: young, strawberry-blonde, clumsy, and illiterate. And Murdo Hesketh: fair-haired, fierce, and suddenly bereaved. Billie will not say why she jumped from ship to shore before the explosion. That silence makes her a suspect. It also draws Murdo toward her with an intensity that neither of them can explain.

Billie’s Kiss has been compared to Brontë and Austen — and it delivers on both comparisons while doing something stranger. The San Francisco Chronicle called Billie “fabulously layered, literally and metaphorically.” The Washington Post called the rendering of sex and romance “strikingly and erotically” done. The Los Angeles Times praised “lush writing and darkly wild settings.”

Knox visited the Hebridean islands of Lewis and Harris in autumn 1999 and describes the landscape as producing “a powerful, almost frightened reaction” — and that reaction is on every page.

A Montana NZ Book Awards finalist, published in NZ, UK, and the United States. Out of print in all original editions.

Why We Stock It:

Gothic romance, Edwardian mystery, and a pink-haired heroine who would be diagnosed with a learning difference today and in 1903 is simply herself. Elizabeth Knox writing at full stretch.