Audience: General
Language: English
A Gap in the Sky
When Ida buys a dilapid
ated lighthouse cottage on a remote Scottish island, she imagines a peaceful new beginning for herself and her six-year-old daughter, Lenka. After years spent moving from Amsterdam to Shanghai to London, Ida longs for quiet: a place to paint, to breathe, to finally stop running. But the cottage has been abandoned for years, the roof is caving in, and an owl has claimed one of the bedrooms as its own. Life here will be anything but simple.
The island community greets them with a wary curiosity. And Ida, despite her efforts to appear settled, brings shadows with her — memories of her time teaching art in Shanghai, where she became unwittingly involved in the world of high-end forgery. When she fled to London, she hoped to escape her mistakes, only to be drawn once more into the orbit of unscrupulous art dealers. Her arrest on suspicion of involvement in the theft of a Cézanne painting shattered what little stability she had left. Though released, the trauma lingers. Lenka’s nightmares return with new ferocity, and Ida fears the past will not stay buried, not with the Cézanne still missing.
Everything shifts when Ida and Lenka befriend ninety-four-year-old Matilda, whose fading memory holds stories that reach further than anyone expects. As their lives intertwine, the three are drawn into a gentle unravelling — of secrets, of time, of the fragile threads connecting who we are to who we might become.
A Gap in the Sky is a work of magical realism about art, fate, memory, and the strange ways we find our way home by wandering into the unknown.
Author Bio
Asia Wieloch was born in Poland, is a Dutch national living in the UK. She writes literary fiction inspired by neuroscience, quantum physics, memory, and the subtle collisions between the inner and outer worlds. 