What is Vicki Delany reading?

Today's featured contributor at Writers Read: Vicki Delany, author of More than Sorrow.

Her entry begins:

Before writing this piece, I thought I’d pop back a year and a half and see what I was reading then. I said I was reading modern-Gothics while writing my own new thriller, More than Sorrow. And, I’m happy to say, More than Sorrow has just been released.

September has been a great month for releases by favourite authors, and I’m happily buying away. In my TBR pile I have Until the Night by Giles Blunt, Watching the Dark by Peter Robinson, and The Face of the Enemy by Beverle Graves Myers and Joanne Dobson. Perhaps my favourite type of book is the British-style police procedural, and no one does it better than Peter, who seems to be able to...[read on]

About the book, from the publisher:

Once, Hannah Manning was an internationally-renowned journalist and war correspondent. Today, she’s a woman suffering from a traumatic brain injury. Unable to read, unable to concentrate, full of pain, lost and confused, haunted by her memories, Hannah goes to her sister’s small-scale vegetable farm in Prince Edward County, Ontario to recover.

As summer settles on the farm, she finds comfort in the soft rolling hills and neat fields as well as friendship in the company of Hila Popalzai, an Afghan woman also traumatized by war.

Unable to read the printed word, Hannah retreats into the attic and boxes of moldy letters that have accumulated for more than two centuries. As she learns about the original settlers of this land, Loyalist refugees fleeing the United States in 1784, she is increasingly drawn to the space beneath the old house. More than carrots and potatoes, soups and jams, are down in the dark damp root cellar.

Hannah experiences visions of a woman, emerging from the icy cold mist. Is the woman real? Or the product of a severely damaged brain?

Which would be worse?

Then Hila disappears. When Hannah cannot account for her time, not even to herself, old enemies begin to circle.

In this modern Gothic novel of heart-wrenching suspense, past and present merge into a terrifying threat to the only thing Hannah still holds dear – her ten-year-old niece, Lily.

Learn more about the book and author at Vicki Delany's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

More than Sorrow received a starred review from Library Journal which called it “a splendid Gothic thriller.” Delany is also the author of the Constable Molly Smith series, a police procedural set in British Columbia, and the Klondike Gold Rush books, a light-hearted historical series.

The Page 69 Test: Among the Departed.

My Book, The Movie: Among the Departed.

Writers Read: Vicki Delany (May 2011).

The Page 69 Test: More Than Sorrow.

Writers Read: Vicki Delany.

--Marshal Zeringue