Festive Fun - Day 10 - Linda Gillard

Day 10 - Linda Gillard is the guest for Festive Fun Author Advent

What is your favourite festive film/book or both?

Well, it’s hardly an original choice but A CHRISTMAS CAROL by Charles Dickens has always been one of my favourite books. I still have the edition I bought when I was a child. It’s a big hardback illustrated by Ronald Searle and it’s one of my most treasured possessions. It became my annual ritual to read it in the weeks before Christmas.

But it’s only since I became a writer myself that I realised just how brilliantly it’s written. If I had to pick the greatest opening page of a book written in English, A CHRISTMAS CAROL would be my choice.

I love Dicken’s message – that it’s never too late to make a new start – and I adore all the ghosts. I’ve finally written my own ghost story and it’s actually set at Christmas. My sixth novel, THE GLASS GUARDIAN is a paranormal love story with a ghost hero and it’s set on the Isle of Skye

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THE GLASS GUARDIAN ebook at Amazon


Ruth Travers has lost a lover, both parents and her job. Now she thinks she might be losing her mind.

When death strikes again, Ruth finds herself the owner of a dilapidated Victorian house on the Isle of Skye: Tigh na Linne, the summer home she shared as a child with her beloved Aunt Janet, the woman she’d regarded as a mother. 

As Ruth prepares to put the old house up for sale, she’s astonished to find she’s not the only occupant. Worse, she suspects she might be falling in love again. With a man who died almost a hundred years ago...

What is your favourite Christmas Carol/festive song?

I love Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols. Listening to those songs takes me back to being a teenager, listening to the school choir tackle the canon, This Little Babe with its eerie echo effect. Despite the title, it’s a vigorous piece and the lyrics (by Elizabethan poet Robert Southwell) offset some of the saccharine sentimentality of Christmas:

“This little babe so few days old,
Is come to rifle Satan's fold;
All hell doth at His presence quake,
Though He Himself for cold do shake;
For in this weak unarmèd wise
The gates of hell He will surprise.”

Mince pie or Choc Yule Log?

Definitely mince pies. I make my own cranberry mincemeat every year using a Delia Smith recipe. She claimed in the recipe that once you’d made your own mincemeat, you’d never buy another jar of the shop stuff. She was absolutely right. I never have.

My mince pies are a little unorthodox. We prefer a lighter version that has a frangipane topping instead of a pastry lid. That’s a Nigella recipe.

You open the door to Carollers, who would be your dream team of Carollers?

Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band.

I was supposed to go and see them play live in Sunderland this year. My son bought tickets for my 60^th birthday and we were going to go together, but then I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I was actually recovering from surgery on my 60^th birthday. So the Boss and I still have to fix a date…

Links

Amazon page: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Linda-Gillard/e/B0034PV6ZQ/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1

Website: www.lindagillard.co.uk

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LindaGillardAuthor

Thank you, Linda

Wishing you well in 2013

DizzyC