Doubting Thomas

This is a story of sex, drugs and blasphemy in late seventeenth-century Edinburgh experienced through four viewpoints over fifteen years: Dr Robert Carruth, his wife Isobel, and university students Mungo Craig and Thomas Aikenhead. After participating in the particularly gruesome autopsy of a pregnant prisoner, Robert is unable to consummate his marriage to Isobel. He buries himself in work, and his overzealousness contributes to the demise of a down-at-heel apothecary named James Aikenhead. Fifteen years pass and the apothecary’s son, Thomas, appears at the Carruths’ door seeking recompense for his father’s death. At his side is Mungo Craig, a cunning poet with dubious loyalties. The two insinuate their way into Robert and Isobel’s life, freshly exposing old fault lines in the Carruths’ marriage and subjecting them to dangerous new pressure.

Heather Richardson was born in Northern Ireland in 1964 and lives in Belfast. After a degree in English Literature at the University of Leicester she had a predictably non-literary series of jobs, including bus driver, medical representative and company director. A career break for child rearing gave her an excuse to pursue a new path as a writer and lecturer. She has an MA and PhD in Creative Writing, and now works for the Open University as a lecturer in English and Creative Writing. Her short stories, poems and creative nonfiction have been published in journals and anthologies in the UK, Ireland and Australia. Her first novel, Magdeburg (Lagan Press, 2010) is set in Germany during the Thirty Years War.