This is a bewitching and atmospheric collection of short stories celebrating life and love: the world ripens as a baby stirs in its mother's womb; a soldier captured at Bannockburn sees the daughter of his jailor bathing and falls in love; two ghosts become reconciled with death; and, an eighteenth-century tale of piracy and treachery. George Mackay Brown's distinctive voice has a clarity and resonance that blends the magical with the mundane, and the present with the past.

Author Biography

George Mackay Brown (1921-96) was one of the major Scottish literary figures of the twentieth century - a prolific poet and novelist, he took much of his inspiration from the myths and landscape of Orkney, and also from his deep Catholic faith. He was born in Orkney in 1921 and died there in 1996. Following his first book in 1954 he published many more, including plays, novels and poems. Sir Peter Maxwell Davies has set much of his work to music. In 1988 he was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Golden Bird. In 1994 his Beside the Ocean of Time was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and judged Book of the Year by the Saltire Society.