Barbara Erskine talks to Emma Corfield-Walters

Barbara Erskine’s Lady of Hay became an instant best-seller on its publication in 1986, and has remained in print ever since. Devoted and new fans alike will be delighted with her new edition that now includes an extra chapter. Erskine celebrates the book’s 40th anniversary and discusses bringing the story right up to date, with Emma Corfield-Walters, owner of independent bookshop Bookish.

The iconic novel blends historical fiction with fantasy, when a journalist debunking the idea of past-life regression submits to hypnotism and finds herself reliving the experiences of Matilda, Lady of Hay, the wife of a baron at the time of King John. As the unspeakable treachery of the past becomes entwined with the present, it becomes clear that, 800 years on, the story is beginning again.