White Cranes Dancing

Is it better to marry than to burn? Edinburgh-based TV journalist Serena MacKenzie's dysfunctional West Highland family seems to prove the opposite. It's 1997, and Serena feels she's reached a crossroads in her life. She's 30, she's newly divorced - yet she still hankers after the perfect, fairy-tale marriage. Life with Max, the Russian she meets and marries over the space of a few heady summer days in St Petersburg, is anything but perfect. And where is Max? She's beginning to wonder if she dreamed him. Fergus Learmonth – the ex-husband and work colleague she divorced after less than a year of marriage – is still very much alive, and keen to get her back. Perhaps she’s still under his spell too? Her aunt, the sole member of Balvaig's MacKenzie family still living there, assures her that what she needs is time alone to take stock of her life and build her career, which seems to be taking off at last. Yet within a few months from the night she saw Max for the last time, she’s teetering on the brink of another affair. But Max is the one who’s still in her head......Max and St Petersburg, where the story both begins and ends. White Cranes Dancing is the first book in the Balvaig trilogy.