Twentieth Century Scottish Womens Fiction – serie
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6 produkter
6 produkter
249 kr
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In A Sparrow's Flight, her second novel, first published in 1989, Margaret Elphinstone is already occupying her characteristic location on the borderlands which were to become familiar territory in her subsequent writing. The novel is set in the 'debatable lands' between Scotland and England but explores more elusive borders between waking and dreaming, sanity and madness, myth and reality, and the unsettling landscape between our imagined pasts and hoped for futures. Thomas and Naomi are on a journey through a world that has experienced catastrophic change. Early reviewers, writing amid the Cold War, placed the story in the aftermath of nuclear holocaust. The author offers no such certainty. The plaintive but unexplained references to 'before the world changed' resonate with a menace all the more unnerving in its ambiguity. Through this regenerating landscape - the previously blighted 'empty lands' - Thomas and Naomi find their journey turns full circle, returning them to their starting point as changed people, with new understandings of friendship and belonging. As with every quest there is a grail and their grail is music.Its rediscovery is a metaphor for that Golden Age we all need to believe existed 'before the world changed'."...powerfully convincing in its blend of medievalism and post-modern disillusion..." Douglas Gifford
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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 Council travel grant) in Iceland. Islanders was first published in 1994. It is now (2008) nearly thirty years since the first draft was written; since then Margaret Elphinstone has lived in other places and written other books. But it was Shetland, and Islanders, that first inspired and formed her as a writer.
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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 gilds the mundane and the ordinary is made extraordinary. Published here with an Introduction by Dorothy McMillan.
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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 offers insights which can be both surprising and disturbing. Her characters are frequently from elsewhere - whether the realms of folklore or far places and different cultures - and display the stranger's ability to make unexpected assumptions or ask uncomfortable questions. "...spicy, ironic, passionate, humorous, painful and witty.." Jennie Renton, Scottish Book Collector
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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 Finavay and, having recently suffered a personal trauma, she looks to inappropriate comforts to make some sense of her present self. These comforts circulate around a group of itinerant travellers - a young child and a lustful young man holding particular fascination for Christa. As the novel develops the imperfect human behaviour patterns of this small town community emerge. These culminate in an illustration of what happens when the desires of the physical body take precedence over the intelligent.Speak, Adam is then an explicit anti-Kailyard portrayal of a West Highland village which assertively refuses the lure of sentiment and romanticism but nonetheless is still capable of a measure of grace. Moira Burgess is a novelist, short story writer and literary historian, born in Campbeltown, Argyll, and now living in Glasgow. Writing has been the most important part of her life since childhood and she has published two novels, The Day Before Tomorrow (1971, reprinted 2009) and Speak, Adam. For some years she worked mainly on non-fiction, publishing The Glasgow Novel: a bibliography (3rd edition 1999) and a book on the same topic, Imagine a City (1998). Author of Mitchison's Ghosts, a study of the supernatural and mythical elements in the work of Naomi Mitchison, she is now working on an edition of Mitchison's collected prose.
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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; of old Pat Brady and his sons in the neglected, womanless apartment opposite, tossed in cross-currents of pity, love and hate; of Eugene Carty, tied to a tyrannical invalid mother, whose problems have an unexpected end; of young Bernadette Sheehan, whose return home after eighteen months working in London, dramatically changes the course of several lives. Moira Burgess has drawn on her own experience while working as a librarian in Glasgow to create the lives and background of her characters, and her natural powers as a storyteller to weave these into a convincing whole.Moira Burgess is a novelist, short story writer and literary historian, born in Campbeltown, Argyll, and now living in Glasgow. Writing has been the most important part of her life since childhood and she has published two novels, The Day Before Tomorrow (first published in 1971) and Speak, Adam published as A Rumour of Strangers in 1987 and reprinted in 2009. For some years she worked mainly on non-fiction, publishing The Glasgow Novel: a bibliography (3rd edition 1999) and a book on the same topic, Imagine a City (1998). Author of Mitchison's Ghosts, a study of the supernatural and mythical elements in the work of Naomi Mitchison, she is now working on an edition of Mitchison's collected prose. Douglas Gifford is Professor Emeritus of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow.