Local author Victoria Scott will fulfill a lifetime ambition when her first novel, Patience, is pub-lished in hardback and ebook on August 5th.
Victoria first began writing Pa-tience in her spare time a decade ago, fitting her passion around her day journalist day job. How-ever, she stopped writing the novel after the birth of her sec-ond child, and only returned to it after her family bought her a creative writing course for her 40th birthday. “I’ve always wanted to write a novel, but that was the push I really needed,” she says. “I felt like it was now or never.”
Shaped by Victoria’s lived experience with her own beloved sister Clare, who has Rett syndrome, Patience tells the story of a family in crisis. The Willow family – mum Louise, dad Pete and daughters Eliza and Patience – struggle with the decision to enter Patience into an experimental gene therapy trial. And although these trials were almost science fic-tion when she started writing the book, they are now soon to become a reality, according to Victoria. “The first gene therapy trials for Rett will start in the USA next year, so the novel’s publication turns out to be incredibly timely,” she says.
Victoria’s sister Clare, now 40, was diag-nosed with Rett syndrome when she was three.
“Rett is a very cruel disease, in that it creeps up gradually on families, stealing away skills bit by bit,” explains Victoria. “My parents had no idea that anything was amiss until she was about eighteen months old, when the skills she’d developed – speaking a few words, pushing her trike, shuffling around on her bottom, holding things – simply fell away.”
Despite ever being unable to speak to her sis-ter, Victoria says that they have an “unspoken language,” something she was determined to feature in the book. “The bond between Patience and her sister is incredibly strong,” she says. “It was really important to me that I reflected on the sib-ling experience in the book, and I hope my fellow ‘sibs’ will read Patience and find themselves in its pages. I really wish I’d read a book like this when I was grow-ing up.”
Despite the book’s weighty sub-ject, it is also an uplifting read, she says. “Patience is a very fun-ny character. She’s sassy, clever and complex. And really, the core message of the novel is the power of unconditional love. I hope read-ing it will leave people with that upmost in their minds.” Patience will be published in hard back and e-book on August 5th by Head of Zeus, and will be available from all good bookshops, both online and in-store. To find out how to pre-order a copy, visit www.toryscott.com/fiction.