Ice Dancing

'He was utterly and completely beautiful out there on the ice. The music was part of the magic, sensual and insistent. He seemed like nothing but movement. I could have watched him all day. A creature of ice and fire. Bright and enticing.' Ice Dancing is a very grown up love story with a Scottish village setting. It's a novel about the lightning strike of desire at first sight. It's a story about rural life, but also about sporting prowess and the toll it can take on those most closely involved. Helen - who tells her own story - has almost resigned herself to the downward slide into mildly discontented middle age. She's an attractive and intelligent woman, approaching forty, married and living in a rural backwater, with her only child about to fly the nest. But when she meets and falls in love with Joe, a Canadian ice hockey player spending a season with a local team, she realises that nothing can ever be the same for either of them again. Joe is nine years younger and - apparently - a hero to die for: good looking, polite and articulate. But although Joe skates like an angel, he has his own demons to cope with, a sadder, more complicated and infinitely more shocking past than Helen could ever imagine. Like so many of Czerkawska's novels, which often deal with sorrow and betrayal, this is an intriguing and enthralling story with a dark side, a story about the physical imperative of attraction between two people, the power of love and the possibility of healing. Catherine Czerkawska is an established and award winning writer living and working in Scotland.