I’d appreciate some feedback - my book is my invented dramatisation of the lives and deaths of people buried in my village graveyard.
I’ve researched their deaths, and were possible lives, with added social history interwoven as the story develops across centuries.
This graveyard has millionaires and penniless homeless, political legends and, as my open chapter’s main character shows, a 14-year-old who dies in an industrial accident. In my book the dead gather in the cemetery to share their life stories, and in chapter one Maggie “chats” to the millionaire in the grave opposite her, a man who changed world history in the Industrial Revolution and created much of our present.
I suspect, if popular at all, it will be with a hyper local audience, but it has been fascinating for me to do the research.
OPENING CHAPTER
She sits on the warm mossy grass just inside his grave, her back resting against the stone wall topped with iron railings.
The generous plot is 12 feet square, so there’s ample room to stretch her thin, gangly legs out in front of her while she makes looping daisy chains, the long tendrils snaking out over her cream linen shroud.
“You do know you killed me, don’t you?” she asks conversationally. For a while he says nothing, just letting the breeze fill the space between them.
Then gently, with mild exasperation only touching the edges of his patience, he answers: “We’ve been through this before Maggie. You know I didn’t, couldn’t have, as, my dear young lady, I was dead nearly 100 years before you were born.”
Maggie McIntosh, forever 14, sighs theatrically.