The Observations

(, Main)

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So there I was with two pens, my two titties, Charles Dickens, two slice of bread and a blank book at the end of my first day in the middle of nowhere. Except as it turned out it wasnt quite the end ...Scotland, 1863. In an attempt to escape her not-so-innocent past in Glasgow, Bessy Buckley - the wide-eyed Irish heroine of The Observations - takes a job as a maid in a big house outside Edinburgh working for the beautiful Arabella. Bessy is intrigued by her new employer, but puzzled by her increasingly strange requests and her insistence that Bessy keep a journal of her most intimate thoughts. And it seems that Arabella has a few secrets of her own - including her near-obssessive affection for Nora, a former maid who died in mysterious circumstances. Then a childish prank has drastic consequences which throw into jeopardy all that Bessy has come to hold dear. Caught up in a tangle of madness, ghosts, sex and lies, she is determined to remain devoted to Arabella. But who is really responsible for what happened to her predecessor Nora As her past threatens to catch up with her and complicate matters even further, Bessy begins to realise that she has not quite landed on her feet.

Author Bio

Jane Harris was born in Belfast and brought up in Glasgow. She has worked variously as a dishwasher, a waitress, a chambermaid and a teacher of English as a Foreign Language. Her story Those Nails was runner-up in the Penguin/Observer Newspaper Short Story competition in1993 and she received an Arts Council Writer's Award in 2000. From 1992 - 1994 she was Writer-in-Residence in HMP Durham. She has also written a number of award-winning short films, two of which - Going Down (2001) and Bait (2000) - were BAFTA-nominated.