Hester and Harriet, Spier-ed into action!
Paula Xiberras
I recently had a chat with English author Hilary Spiers, to talk about her new book ‘Hester and Harriet’. Hilary says she hasn’t visited Australia as yet but has visited ‘our cousin’ New Zealand where she spent 5 months in 2006.
In Hilary’s novel ‘Hester and Harriet’ she has given us some unique heroines, two widowed ladies that in spite of their reaching, er, hem, retirement age, they are finding a new lease on life away from their comfort zone of home baking and relaxing reading, to solve a local, extending to international, mystery. The names of the characters intentional or otherwise give a clue to the ladies nature. Hester means bride (which she was and maybe will be again) and also means ‘star’ and Hester is most definitely following her own star! Perhaps ironically her sister’s name, Harriet means ‘home ruler’ and as we have stated although she with her sister rules home and hearth it would seem she’s not ready for the sedentary life just yet. As Hilary says ‘sometimes life takes you where you least expect it’.
The novel opens with the ladies working on an excuse to prevent them having to spend their Christmas with their not so close cousins. Fate intervenes when a chance encounter with a seemingly lost young lady and her baby appeal to the ladies soft hearts and compassionate gesture to take the young lass and her baby home, to pamper a little or at least give the basic essentials of food and shelter. It is only when strangers start calling at their house asking after a young woman that the ladies find something more devious is afoot. With the help of their young nephew, who is also adverse to a family Christmas, and a loveable local homeless gentleman in the finicky and fabulous Finbarr, they do some sleuthing.
Hilary has turned our perceptions of retirement age people in more of a reverse than the ladies accomplish with their car, giving hope to all of us that an exciting, casual career life really can start after formal work ends!
Hester and Harriet is out now published by Allen and Unwin.