The Final Chapter
Rereading Lady of Hay in preparation for our 40th anniversary talk at the Festival last month made me realise how the ‘modern’ part of the story, set back in the 1980s, now reads as a historical novel in its own right, but it doesn’t seem to matter. The novel has stayed with me and millions of readers all over the world vividly ever since I wrote it and when my publisher first decided to issue an anniversary edition after 25 years I seized the chance to write about those characters again. Surely they too would remain haunted by the seismic events that had happened to them? Was all that trauma really over? The result was a short story called The Final Chapter which was included at the end of that edition in 2011. The characters are older obviously, but not necessarily wiser. We at last meet mobile phones, and Jo has upped her car to a new MX5, but the past still stalks her and those around her.
As the story wasn’t included in later imprints of the novel for reasons of space, and as so many people have told me they haven’t seen it, I have decided to put it up here on my website. There is a reason. It is the missing link. Jo has still to this day not been able to put the past behind her. She is now living in Hay, barely half an hour’s drive from The Valley of Ravens …
