Mary Sharratt

English author Mary Sharratt came to the United States April 3 for a two-week book tour to promote her latest novel, "Daughters of the Witching Hill."

She's still here, another stranded victim of the Iceland ash.

It's not all bad. Sharratt grew up in Bloomington and attended the U of M, so she's happy to spend a little more time with her mom. And mom's OK with that, too, Sharratt reports.

They walked around the Minneapolis lakes this weekend and went out for ice cream.

But Sharratt has writing to do, and meetings back home in Manchester. And there's her horse, Boushka.

Her husband, Jos Van Loo, was here for the first part of the tour, but flew back last week on one of the last planes to land in Europe. Even then, his last leg back to England was canceled, so from Amsterdam he took a ferry, a train and night bus to get back to his car at the Manchester airport. And then the car's battery was dead. 

His luggage is still in Amsterdam.

But Van Loo has been able to check in on Boushka — and pay the horse's "baby-sitters," Sharratt said. "He doesn't know enough to take care of her, but he did bring beer to her baby-sitters," she said.

Sharratt writes historical women's fiction, and the latest book is about English witches in 1612. The East Coast swing of her book tour in early April included a stop in, appropriately, Salem, Mass.

Her first book, "Summit Avenue," was published by our local Coffee House Press, and is the story of a young German immigrant in Minnesota in the early 1900s who translates fairy tales for an enigmatic older woman.

Sharratt was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award in 2005.

The airlines say the earliest possible rescheduled flight for her will be next Monday — and it could be worse, if the volcano keeps spewing. She's already hit most of the local bookstores to autograph copies of her books they have in stock.

Now she's talking with her publicists at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in New York to try to schedule more author events in town.

"My husband has emailed the files of my novel-in-progress, so I can work on that, and I'm writing blog posts for a virtual blog tour," she said. "I want to put this time to good use."