Beth Cowan Erskine is an American expat who married into a mad Scottish family with their own tartan and family tree older than her home country. Using them as inspiration, she wrote her first novel during the coronavirus lockdown, hoping it would be enough to get her dis-invited from the annual family walking holiday. Sadly, it backfired and led to long discussions of who will play whom in the film. When not writing features for The American Magazine, she owns an interior architecture and design studio in the Cotswolds.