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.

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.

A haunting, compelling historical novel, The Sea Road is a daring re-telling of the 11th-century Viking exploration of the North Atlantic from the viewpoint of one extraordinary woman. Gudrid lives at the remote edge of the known world, in a starkly beautiful landscape where the sea is the only connection to the shores beyond. It is a world where the old Norse gods are still invoked, even as Christianity gains favour, where the spirits of the dead roam the vast northern ice-fields, tormenting the living, and Viking explorers plunder foreign shores. Taking the accidental discovery of North America as its focal point, Gudrid's narrative describes a multi-layered voyage into the unknown, all recounted with astonishing immediacy and rich atmospheric detail.

Between Grandmother Mountain and the cold sea, Alaia and her family live off the land. But when her brother goes hunting and never returns, the fragile balance of life is upset. Half-starved and maddened with grief, Alaia's mother follows her visions and goes in search of her lost son. The Gathering Night is a story of conflict, loss, love, adventure and devastating natural disaster. This gripping novel is set deep in our stone-age past, but resonates as a parable for our troubled planet 8,000 years on.

After an introductory chapter treating generally Britain's war-time Middle Eastern policies and the activities of the Sherifians, the individual cases of Faisal, Abdullah and Husain are considered in separate chapters. With regard to Faisal and Abdullah, the analysis concludes at that point at which Britain made a definitive commitment to Sherifian rule in Iraq and Transjordan. In the final chapter, Britain's policy of supporting Husain is considered and the reasons for the failure of the policy of supporting the family as a whole are assessed in light of the collapse of Sherifian rule in the Hijaz. Despite that failure, the author concludes that, viewed in the context of the post-war Middle Eastern settlement, British sponsorship of Hashemite rule represented sound policy.

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

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.

An utterly enchanting prehistorical novel set deep in our Stone-Age past, but resonating as a parable of our troubled planet 8,000 years on--an ecoparable, family saga, and Stone-Age adventure in one

Between Grandmother Mountain and the cold sea, Alaia and her family live off the land--but when one of her brothers goes hunting and never returns, the fragile balance of life is upset. Half-starved and maddened with grief, Alaia's mother follows her visions and goes in search of her lost son. When a stranger from a rival tribe appears on their hearth seeking shelter, they wonder if his stories of a great wave and a people perished are to be believed. What else could drive a man to travel alone between tribes in the depths of winter? Hopes of resolution come when Alaia's mother returns home as a "Go-Between," one able to commune with the spirits. But as all the Auk people come to get her for their annual Gathering Night, who there will listen to the voice of a woman? This is a compelling, genre-busting story of conflict, loss, love, adventure, and devastating natural disasters.

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

This book is from the acclaimed author of Voyageurs and The Sea Road. It will appeal to readers of historical fiction and fans of Elphinstone. The author has published eight novels and is firmly established as a writer of superb historical fiction.May, 1831, and on a tiny island off the Isle of Man, a lighthouse provides a harsh living for an unusual family. Lucy and Diya, husbandless and with three children between them, watch over the ancient light on Ellan Bride. Meanwhile the Scottish engineer, Robert Stevenson, is modernising the nation's lighthouses, and Ellan Bride - and the future of the family - are under threat. When two surveyors arrive to assess the light, tension escalates to danger point.