Library to host novelist for Book Week event

Shetland Library will be hosting the novelist Lindsay Inkster during Book Week Scotland this week.

A nurse and midwife with strong Shetland connections, Inkster (her maiden name, in real life she is Dr Lindsay Reid) has written two novels Lassickie, published in 2013, and its sequel In the Sky the Larks Still Sing, newly published in September.

The first book in the series is set in turn of the century Shetland and Aberdeenshire, and the second follows the fortunes of the character Charlotte and her family as World War One looms.

Shetland features in both books, and is home from home for Inkster, who first visited as a child in 1946.

She remembers the trip on the old St Clair, sleeping head-to-tail with her peerie brother Alan in a mahogany bunk and spending a happy month with their cousins the Reids in Walls.

Alan moved to Shetland permanently in 1968, and started the jewellery company Hjaltasteyn. He married Ruby Moncrieff in 1971 and together they started Da Gairdins in 1991. Alan died in 2009.

Inkster’s Shetland connections go back further than that however. Her grandmother Charlotte Lindsay Stewart came to Shetland as a young teacher, aged about 20, in the 1890s, and married Robert Inkster of Scalloway who was factor of Burra Isle.
Inkster herself comes to Shetland every year and enjoys her time in the isles.

• Shetland Library will be hosting two events featuring Lindsay Inkster. The first will be held in the Yell Community Library on Wednesday evening and the second will be in Lerwick’s Old Library Centre (next to Shetland Library) on Saturday afternoon, 29th November.