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"A haunting and compelling historical novel, The Sea Road is an ambitious retelling of the Viking exploration of the North Atlantic from the viewpoint of one extraordinary woman. Taking the accidential discovery of North America as its focal point, what emerges is a multi-layered voyage into the unknown - the personal, the geographical and the spiritual - all recounted with wonderfully rich, atmospheric detail. Elphinstone's feel for character, period and landscape is as spellbinding as her ability to describe issues of universal interest and the The Sea Road she has produced a historical novel of outstanding quality.".
THE GATHERING NIGHT is a story of conflict, loss, love, adventure and devastating natural disasters. This utterly enchanting pre-historical novel is set deep in our stone-age past, but resonates as a parable of our troubled planet eight thousand years on.
In the early 1800s, Rachel Greenhow, a young Quaker, goes missing in the Canadian wilderness. Unable to accept the disappearance, her brother Mark leaves his farm in England, determined to bring his sister home. What follows is a gripping account of Mark's odyssey and his travels with the voyageurs - the men who canoe Canada's fur-trade route. As adventure and discovery propel the plot forward, Elphinstone takes the reader back in time and intertwines the story with enduring themes of love, war and family ties.
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...
"Sidony Redruth is a fraud. After faking the winning entry in a writing competition she has been sent by her editor to write the first-ever travel book on Hy Brasil, a near-mythical island somewhere in the Atlantic. Taking the island location as her starting point, Elphinstone throws in some old-fashioned piracy, a lost treasure, modern-day drug smuggling, political intrigue, an active volcano and a tragic love affair. Told through Sidony's notes for her book, Hy Brasil has all the elements of a classic adult adventure story infused with a comtemporary twist.".
A compelling family drama of love and loss, set deep in our stone age past
This is the intimate and revealing autobiography of Margaret Rhodes, the first cousin of Queen Elizabeth II and the niece of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. Margaret was born into the Scottish aristocracy, into a now almost vanished world of privilege. Royalty often came to stay and her house was run in the style of Downton Abbey. In the Second World War years she 'lodged' at Buckingham Palace while she worked for MI5. She was a bridesmaid at the wedding of her cousin, Princess Elizabeth to Prince Philip. Three years later the King and Queen attended her own wedding; Princess Margaret was a bridesmaid. In 1990 she was appointed as a Lady-in-Waiting to the Queen Mother, acting also as her ...
On a tiny island off the Isle of Man in 1831, sisters-in-law Lucy and Diya are raising their children together far from prying Victorian eyes, even as they dread the day the outside world will come to their island. That invasion arrives in the form of a surveyor and his assistant, sent to the remote outpost because a new lighthouse must be built and, according to custom of the time, a man must be found to replace the current lighthouse keeper, Lucy.
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