Locations of A Granite Silence with Nina Allen

A Song of Ships and Shorelines: a journey to Aberdeen

Locations in A Granite Silence

Which comes first: the location, or the book? For me as a writer, the answer to this question is not always clear cut. Sense of place has always been important to me; everything I have ever written has been in some way inflected by it, and in more than a few cases directly inspired by it. As someone who has moved around the country quite a lot, writing about a place has often been my way of trying to understand it, of exploring its history and geography, of coming to terms with finding myself in a new place yet again or of developing a relationship with somewhere that, for whatever reason, has captured my imagination.

My first novel The Race was written as a response to moving out of London and back to the south coast and features an alternative version of the seaside town of Hastings alongside the real one.

My 2021 novel The Good Neighbours, a crime story with fantastical elements, is set entirely on the Isle of Bute, where I currently live. I began working on it in 2017, soon after I moved to the island, and in a way it is an encoded diary of my first year in Scotland.

 Aberdeen – the Granite city

Locations in A Granite Silence

Having spent most of my life in the south of England, being in Scotland felt at first like living upside down. I found it strangely disorientating, looking at the map of Britain from a completely different angle than the one I was used to. However,  I quickly became fixated on discovering more about the towns and cities that were once distant from me but that were now just a train ride away. I have always been naturally drawn to coastal places. I became interested in Aberdeen because of its intimate relationship with the sea.

 Aberdeen as the UK’s ‘fishing capital’

Locations in A Granite Silence

For centuries, Aberdeen was one of Britain’s most important ports and centres of shipbuilding. Through the first half of the twentieth century, Aberdeen was the UK’s ‘fishing capital’, then from the late 1970s, the city renewed itself again through the discovery of North Sea oil.

The COVID lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 left me hungrier than ever to explore new places, to discover a new city. I already had an idea for a novel I wanted to write, about a Russian émigré who comes to Britain to escape the Bolshevik revolution. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Aberdeen still had significant shipping links with the Russian ports of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk, and so I knew the story I had in mind would fit the location.

Montrose Basin

Locations in A Granite Silence

I set off for Aberdeen in the summer of 2021. I’d travelled to the north of Scotland on several previous occasions, but this was the first time I’d taken the coastal line, travelling through Arbroath and Montrose, where the watery expanse of the Montrose Basin, a natural lagoon and now a wetlands nature reserve, can be seen from the train. The geography, weather and atmosphere of the east coast differs significantly from that of my own west coast and so the sense of discovery, the feeling of being inspired began to take hold of me even before I arrived in the city.

Locations in A Granite Silence

The central inspiration for A Granite Silence was a story I stumbled across completely by chance while I was on that journey. I had taken a book along for the ride, a compendium of true crimes that had taken place in Aberdeen through the past hundred years. Like many writers, I have long been interested in true crime literature as a form of social history, and most especially because every crime is inextricably linked with the place in which it happens. All the accounts in the book were fascinating, but there was one in particular that caught my attention, and by the time I arrived in Aberdeen I knew I was going to have to find out more about it.

62 Urquhart Rd where the crime took place

Locations in A Granite Silence

I could not have written A Granite Silence without going to Aberdeen: walking the streets where the people involved in the case lived and worked was essential to me in framing the story, in imagining myself into its world. But if I had not taken that journey in the first place, I might never have learned about the tragic events that took place on a rainy Aberdeen Friday in 1934. In the case of A Granite Silence, the book and its location truly are one.

A Granite Silence without going to Aberdeen: walking the streets where the people involved in the case lived and worked was essential to me in framing the story, in imagining myself into its world. But if I had not taken that journey in the first place, I might never have learned about the tragic events that took place on a rainy Aberdeen Friday in 1934.

In the case of A Granite Silence, the book and its location truly are one.

BookTrail Boarding Pass: A Granite Silence

Website: www.ninaallan.co.uk/