The Darien Venture was the singular event at the end of the seventeenth century that fundamentally altered Scotland’s future.

It took place on the other side of the world, amid the jungle-coastline at the junction between the continents of North and South America. And most of us know next to nothing about it.

Now it’s time to remedy that. Award-winning novelist Val McDermid and Geographer Royal for Scotland Jo Sharp unite in this revelatory novella to trace the story of Scotland’s only trading colony, which turned from a dream of prosperity to a nightmare that bankrupted an already impoverished nation and propelled it towards political union with England.

Written as a series of letters home from expedition scientist Dr James Wallace to his wife Eliza and Sir Robert Sibbald, the first Geographer Royal, this epistolary tale offers a devastating account of the forces that doomed the endeavour and completely changed the history of the British Isles in the process.

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'Unpicks many of the myths about the Darien venture being a bumbling attempt from Scotland to stand on its own two feet . . . as the creeping sensation of betrayal by the English and Scottish landed gentry takes over, outrage seems to come freely to the book's modern writers'

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'McDermid and Sharp’s novella is as well-researched as it is imagined. Put the two together and the door of history starts to creak open'

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'McDermid and Sharp skilfully flesh out how and why the expedition fails'

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‘You’ve made the story accessible to people who maybe just know the name of it [the Darien Venture] or a little about it. It’s fascinating because you have done it in such a personal way… This Door of the Seas is a historical novella, but it's a love story as well. The book is wonderful'

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‘A pacy narrative written in propulsive epistolary form’

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'This Door Of The Seas has a sense of wonder that wouldn’t be out of place in Gulliver’s Travels... an enriching and impressive retelling of a crucial moment that would change Scotland’s future'