Christine Lindsay was born in Ireland, but now makes her home in British Columbia, on the west coast of Canada with her husband and their frown family. She tells us some of the motivation behind her historical series.

What on earth did a father’s love feel like?
One of my clearest memories of my dad was when I was a child of seven, and I was in the hospital for pneumonia. It was his evening to visit me, as my mother was staying at home with my sister. I waited in my hospital bed, looking out the window to the street below, waiting for him to come up the street.

Daddy never showed up. Ten minutes after visiting hours were over he sheepishly staggered in. A frowning nurse allowed him five minutes with me. I smelled the beer on his breath as he leaned over to kiss me on the cheek. How rarely he kissed me, and in spite of the beer-stained breath, the kiss filled a cold emptiness that bunched up in my chest as I’d waited for him. When he left me minutes later, even as a kid of seven I knew my dad spent the time he should have been visiting me, down at the pub. I also knew he was on his way back there, back to the pub to order another drink.

For years I wished I had a different father. Not all of us grew up with the loving dad who carved the Christmas turkey, took us on vacation to the beach, and fixed broken toys. In fact, my dad broke my toys—accidentally of course—but he broke my stuff more frequently than he gave things to me.

His drinking robbed me of my childhood. From the time I was twelve I was looking out for my mother, watching that daddy didn’t hurt her, and helping to financially support her, myself, and my younger brother and sister with my babysitting jobs.
How many families are destroyed by alcoholism?

Thank God the heavenly Father didn’t leave me in that despair. In my teens I learned how much the Lord loved me and He became my dad. It was also the power of a loving savior that helped my mother stand up to her abusive and neglectful husband. My mum and we three kids ran away from my dad in 1978. Daddy sadly remained an alcoholic to his dying day.

Things went well for me, but sadly not for my younger brother and sister. It seemed they inherited the same addiction as our dad. With despair and disgust I watched alcoholism destroy their lives.

It took years of prayer, but at long last I saw God bring my brother out to a life of sobriety. I’m still praying for my sister.

It’s because I’ve seen the power of God changing my life and that of my family that I want to tell everyone I know that you don’t have to remain in that broken despair of an unhappy childhood.

A dark childhood can be changed into a bright and beautiful life.
And I believe in happy endings in my writing because I’ve seen happy endings in my own life through the promises of Jesus Christ.

My entire series Twilight of the British Raj shows the healing of a family first tainted by a father’s alcoholism. In book 1, Shadowed in Silk, my heroine Abby Fraser stands up to her drunken and abusive husband. In book 2, Captured by Moonlight, my Indian heroine Eshana stands up to her fanatical Hindu uncle who won’t allow her to live as a Christian. And in the final book 3, Veiled at Midnight, my character Cam (who was a boy in book 1) and is now a man, faces his inner demons that he has inherited his father’s addiction to alcohol.

It’s because I’ve seen the healing of so many people in my family that I wrote this series set in a historical era. I write not about drunkenness, but the tingling feeling of when God makes everything thing new.

VEILED AT MIDNIGHT, 
As the British Empire comes to an end, millions flee to the roads. Caught up in the turbulent wake is Captain Cam Fraser, his sister Miriam, and the beautiful Indian Dassah.

Cam has never been able to put Dassah from his mind, ever since the days when he played with the orphans at the mission as a boy. But a British officer and the aide to the last viceroy cannot marry a poor Indian woman, can he?

As this becomes clear to Dassah, she has no option but to run. Cam may hold her heart—but she cannot let him break it again.

Miriam rails against the separation of the land of her birth, but is Lieutenant Colonel Jack Sunderland her soulmate or a distraction from what God has called her to do?
The 1947 Partition has separated the country these three love…but can they find their true homes before it separates them forever?

JIM:   Thanks Christine for sharing with us.  Her first romance novel, Londonderry Dreaming,  set in Ireland, was published by the Pelican Book Group in 2014. Sofi’s Bridge will be released in 2015.

You can contact her at her website: www.christinelindsay.com