Daisy Chain

Lily Crawford and Jeanie Taylor grew up in Kirkcudbright in very different households, yet their childhood friendship held firm. Both had set their hearts on a future: Lily wanted to paint, and Jeanie wanted to dance.

Before the First World War their paths split. Jeanie left home to join a dance company, and Lily enrolled at The Mack, the Glasgow art school designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. A chance meeting brought them back together, and they came to know a Glasgow that was wealthy and powerful as the Second City of the Empire, but also crowded and poor.

After the war they were parted again, this time by oceans. Lily followed her husband to Shanghai, while Jeanie's dancing made her an international name. The glamour and excess of 1920s Shanghai eventually put Lily in serious danger, and her best hope of rescue lies with Jeanie, who must turn to desperate measures to save her.

The novel draws on the lives of the Glasgow Girls, a group of pioneering women artists, particularly Eleanor Allen Moore. Its themes are independence, women's art, resilience and female friendship, set against the unsettled early decades of the twentieth century.