But who is really responsible for what happened to her predecessor Nora? As her past threatens to catch up with her and complicate matters even further, Bessy begins to realise that she has not quite landed on her feet.

Caught up in a tangle of madness, ghosts, sex and lies, she remains devoted to Arabella. The Observations The Observations is a hugely assured and darkly funny debut set in nineteenth-century Scotland. Then, a childish prank has drastic consequences, which throw into jeopardy all that Bessy has come to hold dear. And it seems that Arabella has a few secrets of her own - including her near-obsessive affection for Nora, a former maid who died in mysterious circumstances. Bessy is intrigued by her new employer, but puzzled by her increasingly strange requests and her insistence that Bessy keep a journal of her most intimate thoughts.

In an attempt to escape her not-so-innocent past in Glasgow, Bessy Buckley - the wide-eyed Irish heroine of 'The Observations' - takes a job as a maid in a big house outside Edinburgh working for the beautiful Arabella. The Observations is a hugely assured and darkly funny debut from novelist Jane Harris, set in nineteenth-century Scotland. Except as it turned out it wasn't quite the end. SynopsisSo there I was with two pens, my two titties, Charles Dickens, two slice of bread and a blank book at the end of my first day in the middle of nowhere. The young mistress of the house, Arabella Reid, is engaged on a magnum opus concerning the demeanour and habits of domestic servants, and she requires housemaids to keep an account of their daily.

The Observations by Jane Harris