Herring Weather

About this book

June 1913. Isobel Ashdown, twenty-eight, raised in a Hampstead solicitor's house and freshly divorced for an adultery she will not apologise for, lands at Lerwick with forty pounds and a trunk of useless gowns. Her former maid Jessie, now a herring gutter, needs a third woman for her crew. Isobel takes the curer's arles, ties her last silk petticoat round her fingers, and becomes the slowest gutter on the station. June 1919. Laid off from Woolwich Arsenal, Isobel comes north again at Jessie's call, and faces Lowrie Halcrow, the Shetland cooper she refused at Yarmouth six years earlier. He is back from the Northern Patrol with a ruined hand, and a widow with a croft would marry him by Lammas. One herring season to learn whether a woman who once lost her name for a yes can make a promise and keep it.