In both book and movie, Penelope sees the painting as a link between past and future, husband and wife, mother and daughter but must convince her grown children that the art work’s true worth has nothing to do with money. The Shell Seekers was made into a television movie starring Angela Lansbury as Penelope Keeling, the novel’s protagonist whose most treasured possession is a valuable painting by her father. “I knew it was longer and that it had more depth, but no one was more amazed than me at its reception.” “I didn’t know when I was writing it that it was going to strike such a chord,” she says. The success of The Shell Seekers, which spans three generations and unfolds in a kaleidoscopic series of flashbacks, took her by surprise. They also have a house in the small town of Dornoch, on the northeast coast of the Highlands, “two sea lochs north of Inverness.” Pilcher patterned the setting for Winter Solstice after the remote, rugged area.Īlthough many Americans didn’t know her name before 1987’s The Shell Seekers catapulted her to fame, Pilcher was familiar to British readers as the author of such gentle romances as The Carousel and Wild Mountain Thyme. She and her husband have four grown children, but two long-haired dachshunds now keep them company in Perthshire. “But he has family in Cornwall, and I knew all of them before I knew him - his cousins, grandmother, this huge extended family.” “My husband’s Scottish and his business was in Dundee,” Pilcher explains.

September is set in Scotland, where she has lived since her marriage to Graham Pilcher in 1946. Born in 1924, she grew up in Cornwall, the setting for much of The Shell Seekers and Coming Home. Pilcher describes her novels as “realistic escapism.” The worlds she creates are fictional, but she draws on places she knows. Set in a small town in the Scottish Highlands in dark December, it centers on five assorted people, each at a turning point, who unexpectedly find themselves sharing a house and the holidays. Martin’s Press, $27.95, 454 pages), published just this week and already another best seller, proves no exception. Her highly anticipated new novel, Winter Solstice (St. Add atmosphere, spice with assorted joys and sorrows, serve warm. Her recipe for her best-selling novels also includes well-rounded characters. “Lovely” is a word Pilcher’s legions of fans often use to describe her fat family sagas - The Shell Seekers, September, Coming Home - replete with detailed descriptions of domestic pleasures. “You bring the water to a boil and cook it for exactly three minutes, then let it cool. “Peppercorns, bay leaves, wine vinegar,” she ticks off the ingredients over the phone from her home near Dundee, Scotland. Writer Rosamunde Pilcher is poaching fresh salmon.

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