Naomi, the enigmatic fiddler, arrives in Clachanpluck, bringing her music and the ominous potential of an incomer. Her unexpected arrival enriches this remote forest village even as she disrupts it. This is a story of an all-consuming love of the land; the power of friendship; the seasonal round of creation and death; and the physical thrill of storm and rhythm, fire and candlelight. The impending sense of catastrophe - global and personal - which haunts this world, finally erupts in violence: trust and love are the casualties. The Incomer follows in the tradition of the ballads: fantasy...

This new edition of An Apple from a Tree, with additional stories previously published elsewhere, provides the reader with the opportunity to revisit some of Margaret Elphinstone's early writing. Themes and motifs which have come to characterise much of her subsequent work are already evident. Her writing resonates with a deep and underlying concern with the way we understand and relate to our environment while at the same time it is always ready to challenge conventional perceptions of myth and reality. By restructuring paradigms and demonstrating the impermanence of accepted boundaries she...

Islanders is Margaret Elphinstone's first novel, written when she lived at Northbanks, Papa Stour in 1979. It is the author's expression of the seven years she lived in Shetland, during which she explored Shetland by land and sea, discovered the sagas while working in Shetland Library, learned to watch birds on Fair Isle, Noss and other islands, and spent several summers as a volunteer on a dig at Da Biggings, Papa Stour, excavating a Norse farm. The novel was re-written in the early 1990s, partly in the National Library of Scotland, partly in Shetland, and partly (thanks to a Scottish Arts...

Speak, Adam, formerly published as A Rumour of Strangers in 1987, is the second novel by the literary historian, Moira Burgess. Returning to her former home area of Argyll, Speak, Adam is set in the gossiping town of 'Finavay' where little escapes the notice of the local tongues. The arrival then of highly-strung Christa Beresford and her husband Billy, who are attempting to open their new home as a bed-and-breakfast establishment, is grist to the mill for the prying and judging nature of Finavay folk. Christa's intent to blend into the local area is conditioned by her childhood memories of...

n the fast disappearing slums of the Claggans district of a big Scottish city, only a few tenements still stand. In this strange half-world a small group of men and women live out one hot summer week of their lives. Experience is heightened by the presence of a maniac among them-a man whom some of them at least must know, a sex killer who already has his eye on his next victim and is planning to strike again. But this is in no way a whodunit. It is a warm and human story of the loves, fears and hopes of simple people: of Mrs Sheehan, feeling lost and useless with her family grown up and gone;...