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by Olga Wojtas (Author)
Shona McMonagle is your ordinary, garden-variety librarian: comfortably padded, in her middle years, expert in various arcane martial arts. She also has an impressive knack for time travel ("impressive" may be overstating things: her first two forays--revolutionary Russia, 19th-century France--went less than smoothly). Her latest mission? Head to 11th-century Scotland, cozy up to Macbeth and Lady M, prevent them from murdering Duncan.
In the ordinary course of things, this would be a doddle. But then there are the witches, who prove remarkably quick to take offense. And the business of being turned into a mouse. And the fact that the mission is in truth threefold. One, keep Duncan alive and kicking; two, correct the historical record and lay bare the ludicrous lies introduced by that silly Shakespeare play; and three, burnish the honor of the Marcia Blaine School for Girls, the finest institution of pedagogy in the greater Edinburgh area. Can she do it? Of course she can! NEVER UNDERESTIMATE A LIBRARIAN!
Author Biography
Olga Wojtas was born and raised in Edinburgh, but canny readers will have spotted her lack of a traditional Scottish name. Her father was a Polish soldier who settled in the UK after the Second World War, and her mother was a teacher assigned to teach the soldiers English. She attended James Gillespie's High School (immortalized in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie), where she fell in love with Russian literature; the first Miss Blaine novel was inspired in roughly equal parts by Muriel Spark and Leo Tolstoy. After graduating from the University of Aberdeen, Olga became a journalist, eventually working in England, France, and Washington, DC, as well as in Scotland. She has had more than thirty short stories published in literary magazines and anthologies, and the Miss Blaine books are her first novel-length works. She lives in Edinburgh with her husband, Alistair. If you are lucky enough to meet her, ask her to tell you about Wojtek the bear.
