She was the author of Ghosting,[1] a memoir of her childhood in a Fife mining village and of being the long-serving ghostwriter of Naim Attallah, the publisher and owner of Quartet Books.
Her father, Edward Crawford, was a bricklayer and market gardener; her mother, Elizabeth (nee Wilkie), was a housewife with a sideline selling corsets from home.
She was head girl, captain of the hockey team, arts dux – highest ranking pupil – and represented Scotland twice in the UK schools’ debating tournament.
[2] Erdal worked for Attallah for 20 years, first as a translator of Russian novels, then as a commissioning editor, starting the series "Quartet Encounters", and finally as unacknowledged ghostwriter.
The title is drawn from a passage in the work of David Hume, the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, in which he argues (against his own empiricism) that it is possible to imagine something not yet experienced – a theme of the novel.