'Her touch is sure, her description admirable. The reader gets a whiff of crushed thyme and of dew on dust as the author tells of Pindar's poetic adventure into Thessaly' TimesKeywords: Pindar Thessaly Whiff Thyme Admirable

'As in a good novel, the people, their feelings and reactions are instantly recognisable and as fresh and immediate today as they were then' GUARDIAN 'She writes vividly and movingly' DAILY TELEGRAPH 26th September 1939. I am beginning to wonder whether the point of a place like this may be that it will keep alive certain ideas of freedom which might easily be destroyed in the course of this totalitarian war... Born in Edinburgh, Naomi Mitchison spent most of the Second World War in the fishing village of Carradale on Kintyre, her home until her death aged 101. Her life was crowded with incident, and her attitudes to events predictably forceful, original and honest. Throughout the war she kept a diary at the request of the research organisation Mass Observation, in which she recorded both the momentous events of the time, and also how one (albeit extraordinary) family and their friends lived, what they hoped for and what actually happened. Her diaries developed far beyond the confines of a social document. Written with the passion of a poet combined with the intellectual curiosity of a radial thinker, they provide a unique and valuable document of the period.

Introduced by Donald Smith. Set in Rome during Nero's reign of terror, The Blood of the Martyrs is a disciplined historical novel tracing the destruction of one cell of the early church. With a cast of slaves, ordinary Roman people, exiles and entertainers, it is thorough in its historical interpretation and in its determination to make the past accessible and readable. Written in 1938-9, the novel contains many symbolic parallels to the rise of European fascism in the 1930s and the desperate plight of persecuted minorities such as the Jews and the left-wing activists with whom Naomi Mitchison personally campaigned at the time. With the invasion of Britain a real possibility, she felt compelled to write a testament to the power of human solidarity which, even faced with death, can overcome the worst that human evil can achieve. The Blood of the Martyrs is the least autobiographical of Mitchison's major works of fiction, yet, with its implicit credo, is her most passionately self-revealing.

Introduced by Naomi Mitchison. Set over two thousand years ago on the calm and fertile shores of the Black Sea, Naomi Mitchison's The Corn King and the Spring Queen tells of ancient civilisations where tenderness, beauty and love vie with brutality and dark magic. Erif Der, a young witch, is compelled by her father to marry his powerful rival, Tarrik the Corn King, so becoming the Spring Queen. Forced by her father, she uses her magic spells to try and break Tarrik's power. But one night Tarrik rescues Sphaeros, an Hellenic philosopher, from a shipwreck. Sphaeros in turn rescues Tarrik from near death and so breaks the enchantment that has bound him. And so begins for Tarrik a Quest - a fabulous voyage of discovery which will bring him new knowledge and which will reunite him with his beautiful Spring Queen.

Naomi Mitchison, daughter of a distinguished scientist, sister of geneticist J B S Haldane, was always interested in the sciences, especially genetics. Her novels did not tend to demonstrate this, and she did not publish a Science Fiction novel until almost forty years into her fiction-writing career. Isobel Murray's Introduction here argues that it is by no means 'pure' Science Fiction: the success of the novel depends not only on the extraordinarily variety of life forms its heroine encounters and attempts to communicate with on different worlds: she is also a very credible human, or Terran, with recognisibly human emotions and a dramatic emotional life. This novel works effectively for readers who usually eschew the genre and prefer more traditional narratives. Explorers like Mary are an elite class who consider curiosity to be Terrans' supreme gift, and in the novel she more than once takes risks that may destroy her life. Her voice, as she records her adventures and experiments, is individual, attractive and memorable. Isobel Murray is Emeritus Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen.

This collection, which Naomi Mitchison published in 1957, is recognisably a 'Carradale book', containing as it does vivid and realistic stories and poems of the landscape and the people. Mitchison had moved to the village in Kintyre, on the west coast of Scotland, some twenty years before and was still much involved in its affairs, supporting the fishing fleet and running her own small farm. Yet, as Moira Burgess suggests in her Introduction to this new edition, these thirteen stories and fourteen interspersed short poems and songs do not make a straightforward, celebratory, collection. The first five stories have historical settings in Caithness and Orkney, with the rest set in the contemporary West Highlands - some drawing on Highland myth and legend. And then, as Burgess writes, 'tucked modestly and apparently at random' is 'Five Men and a Swan' - 'a fine story, probably her best, a classic of Scottish literature'. Mitchison's years of intense involvement with the community were in fact drawing to an end. From the early 1960s onwards, she applied her energy and enthusiasm to the cause of the Bakgatla tribe in the newly independent country of Botswana. Her writing would turn to African themes, and, in 'a marvellous late flourish', to science fiction. Seen in this light, the book may be not so much a celebration as a coda to Mitchison's Carradale years.

In 1957, Naomi Mitchison enjoyed two months 'of observation and thought' as she travelled in parts of postcolonial West Africa. She was the guest of friends new and old and, in Ghana, stayed at the Press Hotel, in her then role as a correspondent with The Manchester Guardian. Her reflections are presented in chapters - on social bars and classes, language, words, history, religion, morals, education, politics, clothes, art and music - as she pulls together her view of the ways in which 'Other People's Worlds', at different stages of development, impact on one another. 'Perhaps', she concludes, 'it is really everyone's world'. Fasten your seat belts, for the delights of Naomi Mitchison's 1981 overview of her travel writing from the 1920s onwards. Drawn from her writings as an author, journalist, letter writer and diarist 'Mucking Around. Five Continents over Fifty Years' is the memoir of an enthusiastic traveller and outspoken observer of 'other countries' - that is, countries across the world as visited from Scotland. The accounts are divided into four sections or bearings: South-West-by-North, West-by-East, East-by-South-East and South.

'We story-tellers have a delightful time playing with history, perhaps finding something fascinating, perhaps making dreadful mistakes.' Here, in The Oath-Takers, the 'central maypole round which the people ... must swing and fall' is Charlemagne, and one of 'the people' a young man who makes his journey to manhood in a world of feudalism and a powerful Church. In the second short novel, Sea-Green Ribbons, the reader enters the political, religious and social tumult of the English Civil War through the story and choices of a young woman, Sarah, from a radical Leveller family in London.

In his 1999 Introduction to the first reprint of this novel from 1955 - a year of the Cold War that began with the Baghdad Pact and ended with the official start of the Vietnam War - Raymond H. Thompson described Naomi Mitchison's contribution to the Arthurian tradition as 'not only a comic masterpiece, but a guidebook into spiritual growth'. She achieves this by drawing on her own experience as a journalist to explore the fantastic events surrounding King Arthur and the Holy Grail through the eyes of two young reporters - on competing newspapers, with mid-twentieth century values and skills - as they follow the breaking stories and conflicting accounts of the grail quest. Michael Amey, who writes the Introduction to this new edition, points out that her approach was not universally liked by her fellow writers. Tolkien for one objected to her introduction of 'a curious and disturbing blend' of journalists and 'dwarfs with photographic apparatus'. Amey himself argues that To the Chapel Perilous is in name and fact a 'call to adventure' in which Mitchison sets out 'to tell a story of how stories are told'.

Early in Orcadia was first published in 1987, and consists of five stories, set hundreds of years apart in time and dealing with different characters, but connected by their location in a particular corner of Orkney during the period known as the Stone Age. Mitchison links them formally by interpolating passages of fact and explanation between the fictional episodes, and by speculating in her own voice about what happened in prehistory, as far as it can be known from archaeological research, and how it fits in with the world of today. The slightly awkward jumps from one story to the next indicate that the development of the human race was not a completely smooth and seamless process. There must have been significant moments when a highly important discovery or invention took place. The structure of the book is demonstrating its theme - that there are sudden advances but just one story running from the earliest times to the present day, and it is the story of humankind. From the Introduction.

This is Naomi Mitchison's least successful novel, and new readers should not start here! It is shaped by her own life and fears in her own experience in 1931, and is the first of her novels and stories not to have a historical setting. Mitchison was appalled by the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy, and wanted to warn the world. She was rather dismayed by the results of the Russian Revolution, of which she had once had great hopes. She also poured all her most personal feelings into the novel, and covered a plethora of subjects - not only free love, abortion and rape, but the unmentionable discussion of marital infidelity, trouser buttons and rubber goods. Her own love life was so complex that she divided it between two sisters in the novel! It spent two years being censored by the publisher while she championed it, but it was crowded, over-written, hectic and unbalanced. It is poor, but Mitchison-lovers will find it impossible to put down. Isobel Murray is Emeritus Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen

"The Bull Calves" was researched and written during the Second World War. This is very surprising, as Naomi Mitchison was tremendously busy at her home in Carradale, Kintyre, keeping open house for evacuees and refugees, running the farm and driving the tractor, organising the local Labour Party, and writing and producing for the dramatic society - and so on. She also wrote a diary for Mass Observation, of more than a million words. But she had to take her time with the novel and plan it more carefully than she usually had time for. She wanted to give Scotland and the world a message, of the need for peace and working together after a bitter war. She chose to write about the aftermath of the Jacobite rising of 1745, and set her novel at Gleneagles, on the Highland line, with her characters her own ancestors. A very personal prefatory poem indicates that the whole operation was very close to her heart, and the ensuing novel is her best historical novel, and still topical today. With an Introduction by Isobel Murray.

The Delicate Fire illustrates a fundamental change in Naomi Mitchison's work. The early stories are set in ancient Greece, like many before them. But here Mitchison effectively says farewell to that setting with accounts of the worlds of Sappho and 'Lovely Mantinea'. By the end, she seems wholly turned to the twentieth century - a new departure for her - tackling subjects such as the General Strike of 1926 and contemporaneous Hunger marches, and battles against censorship. This shift marks her politicisation, her growing fear of fascism, but more personally also the end of her long affair with a distinguished scholar of the ancient world. She turns away from Greece for good. She turns to the present, and will spend the thirties warning against fascism. Isobel Murray is Emeritus Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen

Naomi Mitchison began her novel-writing career in the 1920s, with historical fictions set in the Ancient world, in Roman and Greek civilisations, and soon won a high reputation world-wide. But she began to move toward present and future as well as past: thus Lobsters on the Agenda (1952) dealt with contemporary Highland life. When in her sixties she began a lasting friendship with a young chief designate of the Bakgatla tribe, Linchwe, she went on to join the tribe, and was adopted as its Mother. She wrote only one adult novel about Botswana, When We Become Men (1965). This fine novel deals with the contemporary fight for equality across southern Africa, and the struggle against apartheid. It ends up projecting towards a future where fighting would be unnecessary. Her main character here is Isaac, a young man brought up in Pretoria, who believes in resistance to a white minority government, and, like Nelson Mandela, backs bloodless sabotage as a political weapon. He deeply distrusts the remnants of the tribal system, and the power of the chiefs. He meets Letlotse, young heir apparent to the Bakgatla, returning home from an expensive but sometimes bizarre or just irrelevant education in Britain. He distrusts old ways too, and is tempted towards national politics, away from the tribe. There are clashes of beliefs, and conflicting ideas and loyalties. There is violence here. There are rapes and murders, and some killings that the Africans regard rather as executions. Here is a vivid, clear account of a troubled people in transition, which helps the reader to understand and empathise with the birth-pangs of a new, post-Imperial, Africa. Isobel Murray is Emeritus Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen