Books by Lesley

1857, Glasgow

A young socialite named Madeleine Smith stands accused of murdering her lover. Thousands wait outside the court to hear the result. The scandalous nature of the affair, detailed explicitly in letters published in newspapers across the world, has made her case a worldwide sensation. But when the jury find themselves unable to decide whether she is guilty, they deliver a verdict of ‘Not Proven’ and Madeleine is freed.

1927, New York

Harry Townsend, a handsome Hollywood film scout, believes he has found the woman once known as Madeleine Smith. He wants to tell her story on film for the new ‘talkie’ generation. Since her trial, she has lived under many names, as a glamorous society hostess in bohemian Bloomsbury, to the likes of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, George Bernard Shaw and William Morris. Until suddenly in 1890, when she disappeared off the face of the earth.

Could this quiet, secretive widow of an Irish labourer be the same Madeleine Smith who once stood trial for murder and escaped?

She has one last secret to tell. Will Harry persuade her to tell it?

1816

A massive volcanic eruption has caused the worst storms that Europe has seen in decades, yet Percy Shelley and Mary Godwin have chosen to visit the infamous Lord Byron at his villa on Lake Geneva. It wasn’t their idea, though: Mary’s eighteen year old stepsister, Claire Clairmont, has insisted.

But the reason for Claire’s visit is more pressing than a summer escape with the most famous writers in the world. She’s pregnant with Byron’s child – a child Byron doesn’t want, and scarcely believes is his own.

Claire has the world in her grasp. This trip should have given her everything she ever dreamed of. But within days, her life will be in ruins.

History has all but forgotten her story – but she will not be silenced. 

London, 1823.

Mary Shelley's real-life friend Isabella Baxter Booth is 'disturbed in her reason' - seeing ghosts and dependent on narcotics to escape a hellish life with an increasingly violent, deranged husband.

Fearful of her own murderous impulses towards him, Isabella flees for her childhood home in Scotland, where she meets an ambitious young doctor, Alexander Balfour. He will stop at nothing to establish a reputation as a genius in the emerging science of psychiatry and he believes that Isabella could be the key to his greatness.

But as his own torments threaten to overwhelm Alexander, is he really the best judge of which way madness lies?

Why did a gifted writer like Sylvia Plath stumble into a marriage that drove her to suicide? Why did Hilda Doolittle want to marry Ezra Pound when she was attracted to women? Why did Simone De Beauvoir pimp for Jean-Paul Sartre? The list of the damages done in each of these sexual relationships between female writers and their male literary partners is long, but each relationship provokes the same question: would these women have become the writers they became without the experience of their own particular literary relationship?

Focusing on the diaries, letters, and journals of each woman, 'Between the Sheets' explores nine famous literary liaisons of the twentieth century and examines the extent to which each woman was prepared to put artistic ambition before personal happiness, and how dependent on their male writing partners these women felt themselves to be. It probes the consequences of the women's co-dependence and reveals how, in many instances, their partnerships liberated unspoken desires, encouraged artistic innovations, and even shored up literary reputations.

Fascinating and absorbing, 'Between the Sheets' is a marvellous read and an invaluable addition to the literature of feminism.

When she discovers that her aunt is critically ill in Canada, Sadie, a reclusive young academic living in a quiet Scottish seaside town, decides to research her family’s past and uncovers the secret that changed her mother’s life for ever.

And just as Sadie begins to examine her own isolated life, she must now also face the circumstances surrounding her grandmother’s mysterious disappearance from a family picnic in Toronto in 1973, and come to terms with what may be the key to her own future happiness.

Crossing three generations and bridging two continents, The Picnic is a beautifully observed, tender, and at times, unsettling novel.