As Margaret sets out to discover where her mother has gone, she must also face the truth of what happened to her family long ago. Only a single letter remains as a clue to Elspeth’s whereabouts. Then, after a bomb rocks Elspeth’s house, and letters that were hidden in a wall come raining down, Elspeth disappears. Her mother warns her against seeking love in wartime, an admonition Margaret doesn’t understand. June 1940: At the start of World War II, Elspeth’s daughter, Margaret, has fallen for a pilot in the Royal Air Force. But as World War I engulfs Europe and David volunteers as an ambulance driver on the Western front, Elspeth can only wait for him on Skye, hoping he’ll survive. As the two strike up a correspondence-sharing their favorite books, wildest hopes, and deepest secrets-their exchanges blossom into friendship, and eventually into love. So she is astonished when her first fan letter arrives, from a college student, David Graham, in far-away America.

March 1912: Twenty-four-year-old Elspeth Dunn, a published poet, has never seen the world beyond her home on Scotland’s remote Isle of Skye. Played out across oceans, in peacetime and wartime but most of all through paper and ink, Letters from Skye is about the transformative power of a letter - the letter that shouldn't have been sent, the letter that is never sent and the letter the reader will keep for ever.NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLYĪ sweeping story told in letters, spanning two continents and two world wars, Jessica Brockmole’s atmospheric debut novel captures the indelible ways that people fall in love, and celebrates the power of the written word to stir the heart. Even without meeting, they know one another. Without having to worry about appearances or expectations, Elspeth and Davey confess their dreams and their worries, things they've never told another soul. Left alone with the letters, Margaret discovers a mother she never knew existed: a poet living on the Isle of Skye who in 1912 answered a fan letter from an impetuous young man in Illinois. But when a bomb hits an Edinburgh street and Margaret finds her mother crouched in the ruins of her bedroom pulling armfuls of yellowed letters onto her lap, the past Elspeth has kept so carefully locked away is out in the open. Mother Elspeth is fond of saying to her daughter that 'the first volume of my life is out of print'. Taught you that a letter isn't always just a letter. I should have told you, should've taught you to steel your heart.

A part of me that started scratching at the wall the day this other war started, that started howling to get out right now, the day you ran off to meet your soldier. Oh, my Margaret, You have no secrets from me, but I've kept a part of myself locked away, always.

Letters from skye