Description
This Door of the Seas by Val McDermid & Jo Sharp
This is the latest in our acclaimed Darkland Tales series, which sees Scotland’s best writers reimagine the country’s history, with previous titles by Denise Mina, Jenni Fagan, Alan Warner, David Greig, and Graeme Macrae Burnet.
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.
REVIEWS
Praise for Queen Macbeth by Val McDermid: ‘Beautifully done’ – THE TIMES
‘Successfully dismantled my blood-soaked Shakesperean assumptions’ – THE GUARDIAN
The Darkland Tales
Polygon’s acclaimed Darkland Tales series tasks Scotland’s best writers with re-imagining stories from the country’s history, myth and legend. This series reclaims history for a modern audience, with Scotland’s greatest contemporary novelists and storytellers taking on the challenge of producing Scottish history 2.0 – a redux of landmark moments from the past, viewed through a modern lens and alive to modern sensibilities.
While each book has a unique voice and distinctive individual identity, the Darkland Tales are united by their punky, anarchic and deliberately in-your-face aesthetic. These books are sharp, provocative and darkly comic, mining that seam of sedition and psychological drama that has always featured in the best of Scottish literature.
Series: Standalone Titles
- A Place of Execution (HarperCollins, 1999)
- Christmas is Murder (Little, Brown Book Group, 2000)
- Killing the Shadows (HarperCollins, 2001)
- Stranded (Little, Brown Book Group, 2005)
- The Grave Tattoo (HarperCollins, 2006)
- Cleanskin (HarperCollins, 2006)
- Trick of the Dark (Little, Brown Book Group, 2010)
- My Granny is a Pirate (Orchard Books, 2012)
- The Vanishing Point (Little, Brown Book Group, 2012)
- Northanger Abbey (HarperCollins, 2014)
- Forensics – The Anatomy of Crime (Profile Books, 2014)
- My Scotland (Little, Brown Book Group, 2019)
- Imagine a Country (Canongate Books, 2020)
- Resistance (Profile Books, 2021)
- Winter (Hodder Press, 2025)
- This Door of the Seas (Birlinn Ltd, 2026)
