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Showing 1 - 11 of
11 matches in All Departments
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Waverley (Paperback)
Walter Scott; Retold by Margaret Elphinstone; Illustrated by Ken Laidlaw
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R182
Discovery Miles 1 820
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Life with his regiment in Scotland is dull until he visits his
uncle's friends in the Highlands, where he meets Fergus McIvor and
his sister Flora. Attracted by the wild freedom and romance of the
Scottish clans, Edward finds himself in a difficult and dangerous
position. His new friends are Jacobites, planning to overthrow King
George and restore the Stuart monarchy. The Jacobites rise in
rebellion. When Prince Charles leads an invasion of England,
Edward's loyalties are hopelessly divided. Whose side will he take?
And what fate awaits them all?
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Heart of Midlothian (Paperback)
Walter Scott; Illustrated by Ken Laidlaw; Edited by Margaret Elphinstone
1
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R183
Discovery Miles 1 830
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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'The Heart of Midlothian' presents the story of Jeanie Deans, a
dairymaid who journeys to London to beg for a reprieve for her
sister. Set in the 1730s, the novel dramatises different kinds of
justice, including lynching by an Edinburgh mob.
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Robinson Crusoe (Hardcover)
Daniel Defoe; Illustrated by Katy Elphinstone; Retold by Margaret Elphinstone
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R251
R205
Discovery Miles 2 050
Save R46 (18%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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Defying his parents, Robinson Crusoe goes to sea. He is captured by
pirates but escapes to Brazil. He makes a fortune using slave
labour to grow tobacco and sugar. He sails to Africa to bring back
more slaves but is shipwrecked on an uninhabited island. Everyone
else is drowned. For over twenty years he lives alone. He learns to
hunt and fish and make shelter. Then the cannibals arrive. Will
this be the end of his adventure - or the chance to escape?
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.
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
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Islanders (Paperback)
Margaret Elphinstone; Introduction by Simon Hall
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R771
Discovery Miles 7 710
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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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.
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.
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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