Claire ebook | Ross Richdale | 9781877438073

The liberated 60s have not reached the shores of New Zealand when Claire, a single pregnant girl is sent up-country to have her child, which is to be adopted out.

The Sloane family are strangers who offer to board her through this time.

But are they?

Claire is thrust into the unknown when, immediately after her arrival, Alan and Hazel Sloane are involved in a truck accident on the farm. It is up to Claire to help. She does but is now alone on the farm. Initial fears at being alone reach a climax when an elderly man arrives to look after the animals.

He is Bob Hodge, Hazel's father. Claire and Bob feed out in the snow and gradually an affinity develops between the pair.

Claire's life is at a tangent and a thread of facts begins to unwind about herself and the family she is living with. Tragedies of the past surface and actions of the present complicate issues.

The local schoolteacher enters Claire's life with consequences that could be tragic while two local women show their true colours.

In this conservative rural area, the tranquillity of the surface hides a darker background that goes back a generation to before Claire was born.

And she is directly involved.

This is a story of how scars of the past are opened and conquered by the love of the present for and by Claire, a girl who becomes a woman in the months that make up 1961.

After a career as a teacher and principal of mainly small rural schools, I live in the university city of Palmerston North in the North Island of New Zealand where I write contemporary novels and science fiction full time, I am married with three children.

I have always had an interest in the written word and have been been a constant reader of current events magazines and newspapers. As a youngster, I used to grab my elder sister's magazines that came from England and read about boarding schools with secret tunnels and mysterious headmistresses who invariably went missing and were replaced by a draconian assistant. I preferred these stories to those in the boys' magazines of the time that were mainly about sports or war. As a teenager, I'd slip into the local library and read overseas newspapers to pick up exotic stories or study the advertisements or television programs of far away cities. Later, I wrote stories to stimulate the children he taught in my classes and ideas were expanded into full-length stories that disappeared into dusty files. I found writing fiction for children was not stimulating enough so switched to writing adult novels and that continues to the present time.

When I am not writing, I enjoy drawing, usually on the computer. Other interests include wandering in the countryside and, in the summer, swimming in mountain streams or bounding through the rapids in a large inner tube tire.

My interest in current events and international incidents serve as a backdrop for many of my novels. Ordinary people rather than the super rich super powerful or violent, are the main characters in my stories. My plots also reflect his interest in the rural lifestyle as well as the cross section of personalities encountered during my years as a teacher.

On the science fiction side I tend to concentrate on futuristic worlds and again have characters that reflect ordinary humans in extra-ordinary situations. Due to their popularity as ebooks, most of my recent novels are science fiction.