Book description
‘You looked for a moment as if you might be going to smile at me,’ he
remarked. ‘But I see I was mistaken; I suspect your smiles are precious
and you hoard them so they are seen only by very special people.’
Anna is a child living in a remote Hebridean community when she meets
the enigmatic and romantic Jimmy Pearl. She carries the memory of their
meeting through to adult life - a life that is full of hardships. Anna’s
parents die and her brother and his wife sell the family croft, forcing
Anna into a loveless marriage with the heartless Fergus. Anna, however,
doesn’t reckon on the return of Jimmy Pearl . . .
‘A fine novel . . . both moving and compelling’ Angus County Press
Lillian Comber wrote fiction and non-fiction for both adults and
children under the pseudonym Lillian Beckwith. She is best known for her
series of comic novels based on her time living on a croft in the
Scottish Hebrides.
Beckwith was born in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, in 1916, where her
father ran a grocery shop. The shop provided the background for her
memoir About My Father's Business
, a child’s eye view of a 1920s family. She moved to the Isle of Skye
with her husband in 1942, and began writing fiction after moving to the
Isle of Man with her family twenty years later. She also completed a
cookery book, Secrets from a Crofter’s Kitchen
(Arrow, 1976).
Since her death, Beckwith’s novel A Shine of Rainbows
has been made into a film starring Aidan Quinn and Connie Nielsen,
which in 2009 won ‘Best Feature’ awards at the Heartland and Chicago
Children’s Film Festivals.
