Tidelines Taster Event with authors Val McDermid & Jo Sharp - This Door of the Seas

The first literary collaboration between bestselling novelist Val McDermid and Scotland’s Geographer Royal Jo Sharp. This is the latest in the acclaimed Darkland Tales series, which sees Scotland’s best writers reimagine the country’s history, reclaiming it for a modern audience. The Darien Venture was the singular event at the end of the seventeenth century that fundamentally altered Scotland’s future. It took place on the other side of the world, amid the jungle coastline at the junction between the continents of North and South America.

Award-winning novelist Val McDermid and Geographer Royal for Scotland Jo Sharp unite in this revelatory novella to trace the story of Scotland’s only trading colony, which turned from a dream of prosperity to a nightmare that bankrupted an already impoverished nation and propelled it towards political union with England.

Val McDermid is a number one bestseller whose novels have been translated into more than forty languages, and have sold over nineteen million copies.Jo Sharp is a Scottish geographer. She researches and writes on geopolitics and feminist geography. In April 2022 she became Geographer Royal for Scotland, the first woman to hold the title.