Elisabeth Gifford

A young couple, Ruth and Michael, has bought an old manse. While renovating, they discover a baby buried in the house. Unusually, the baby's legs are fused together. The story goes back and forth among the couple, a vicar, Alexander Ferguson, who had ministered to the people there, and his housemaid, Moira. The couple wishes to discover the wife's background; she had been raised in an orphanage, not knowing who her father was and her mother allegedly committing suicide. The vicar wishes to find out the truth about the legends of selkies, mermaids, and Finnmen. Darwin's theory has just exploded on the world and the reverend wants to find out how these legends might be real people and fit into the evolutionary chain. Moira carries a torch for him. The novel kept my interest all through and the different viewpoints added to it. A satisfactory ending was very logical.… (meer)

Dual timeline mystery set in Scotland. A voice of a long-buried body opens the novel. It moves to the 1940s to introduce main characters Caro and Alasdair. After the war, they marry and move to a small house on the grounds of Kelly Castle (instead of London as they had planned), near Alasdair’s mother. Caro is unhappy with this situation. In going through the family records, she discovers a mystery, which takes her mind off her troubles. The other timeline pertains to the mystery and takes place in the 19th century and involves Alasdair’s great grandfather, Oliver.

The author weaves the two timelines together to gradually reveal the answer to the mystery. There are several similarities between the timelines, with common themes such as the changing role of women, the relationships between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law, friendship, prejudice, and class differences. It includes a story of an arctic whaling expedition and the crew’s interactions with the indigenous people.

This book brings together a number of my areas of interest – maritime travels, adventures in the extreme cold, gothic elements, and two historic periods that are portrayed in an atmospheric manner. I enjoyed this story as both a satisfying mystery and a pleasing blend of interesting topics.… (meer)

I have for a long time been fascinated by this tiny group of islands far off the coast of Scotland, the furthest flung inhabited part of the British Isles until the final small population of 36 souls were evacuated in 1930. Their survival had become increasingly precarious due to their economy of bird products and tweed being unable to keep up with the changing world in the late 19th and early 20th century, and the population having diminished as young people and whole families left the island to seek a future elsewhere.

This story concerns the visit of two eager young Cambridge archaeology students - Archie Macleod, son of the island's owner, and his friend Fred Lawson - to the island in summer 1927 and how they interact with the locals, particularly with young Chrissie Gillies. We are also presented with Fred Lawson being a prisoner of war in France in 1941 and through jumps between time zones, the novel traces the course of events between 1927 and 1941, and the happy ending that results for our leading characters. For once in a novel set partly in the Second World War, the War is not the main focus, the islands of St Kilda are the real hero of the story - a beautiful and terrifying set of rocks essentially in the open Atlantic and subject to that ocean's raw power and fury.

Birds were the very essence of the islanders' lives, the source of protein and one of the main economic strengths of the islanders: "the sky is alive with bird wings.. The black-tipped bent spikes of the great gannets’ wings, the flutter of scissorbeaked kittiwakes, fulmars, skewars, puffins, petrels – the same birds that supply most of the islander’s primitive diet." Even now, when St Kilda is a World Heritage site, it is "home to a tenth of the British Isles’ seabird population". Its inhabitants understandably saw it as the centre of their universe and its way of life against the encroachment of the outside world. As Chrissie says, "I believed in my heart that there was no better place or family that a child might have than this island, this jewel that had fallen from the pocket of God and where all men feel Him near and find the blessed solace of being welcome at every hearth along the strand of lighted bothies, be it even in the greatest and the darkest of storms."… (meer)