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Tina Beattie
ALLi Author Member
Location: United Kingdom
Genres: Academic, Essays, Philosophy, Religion, Contemporary Fiction, Crime, General Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Thriller, Women's Fiction
Who am I?
Writer, grandma, wild swimmer, theologian, hanging on in there but not yet sure where there is.
I grew up in Lusaka and have spent much of my life in sub-Saharan Africa (Zambia, Kenya and Zimbabwe).
I left school at 15 and became a secretary, following my mother's advice to learn to type before I got married, so that if my husband ever left me I'd be able to support myself and my kids. (51 years on and he still hasn't left).
After years as a frustrated secretary and failed attempt to be an earth mother, I started university when the youngest of my four children started school.
Somehow, I went from being an agnostic and rather conservative Presbyterian typist with very little education to being feminist Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Roehampton, which is too long a story to tell here.
Along the way I've published a few books and now I've left my academic post and am focusing on my first and lifelong passion - to write fiction.
In 2020, I moved with my husband Dave from a houseboat in London to live near the wild and remote dunes and beaches of Camber Sands on the south coast. We now divide our time between Camber and Stirling in Scotland.
Tina Beattie's books
The Good Priest
This psychological mystery thriller follows a young parish priest, Father John, through a traumatic season of Lent, when he becomes convinced that a serial killer preying on prostitutes is the anonymous stranger visiting the confessional and threatening to do "pure evil". The stranger seems familiar and John eventually idenfies him as a cardinal whom heremembers with horror from his seminarian days in Rome, but the cardinal is dead, so who or what is in the confessional? As John himself becomes a suspect in the search for the murderer, he is caught up in a terrifying cat and mouse game as he tries to identify the killer and protect the sex workers he is befriending in the city's red light district. But what will happen if his own terrible secret is revealed in the process? The Good Priest has attracted excellent reviews on Amazon, GoodReads and NetGalley. An "absolute masterpiece.. I...
Between Two Rivers
“Msasa trees provided dappled shade for Jenny’s tea party. April sunshine dribbled through the leaves onto suntanned arms. The frangipanis were in bloom ...” This is the scene that greets Scottish doctor Morag soon after her arrival in Salisbury in the 1950s. Jenny is an English wife and mother trapped in an increasingly violent marriage and secretly in love with another man. Soon, Beatrice will come to work as Jenny’s maid and nanny to her children. Over the next twenty years these three women will form deep bonds of affection, but can their loyalty to one another survive as the façade of white suburban life is shattered by war? In a novel that moves from the Firth of Clyde in Scotland to pre-independence Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia), from the illusory idyll of colonial privilege to the traumas of guerrilla war, Beattie explores the hidden lives and untold stories of those caught...
MAGGIE JACKSON'S ODYSSEY
Psychotherapist Maggie would have said she was contented, if not happy, in her marriage, until she discovered her geriatric pop philosopher husband, Colin, was having an affair. She set off on a spontaneous odyssey across Europe, but Maggie's libido was not as exhausted as she thought, and she too was susceptible to the seductive allure of a late-life dalliance. A year later, Maggie broods and reminiscences as she prepares for Colin's 71st birthday during lockdown. Then a surprise revelation from him jolts her into a new reality. How well do married couples really know each other?