This collection celebrates winter and its festivals, light and darkness. It includes the tales of Lieutenant William Bligh at the port of Hamnavoe, an Edinburgh man rediscovering his roots in Shetland, Baltic-men shipwrecked on the Orkney coast, and Norse warriors setting out for the Holy Land.Through these stories George Mackay Brown explores the effects of new ways of thinking and working on the ancient patterns and traditions of Orkney life.

George Mackay Brown was born in Stromness, Orkney, on 17 October 1921. He died there in 1996. His many awards include a Society of Authors Travel Award, 1968; SAC Literature Prize, 1969; Katherine Mansfield Menton Short Story Prize, 1971; Hon. LLD from Dundee University, 1977; OBE, 1974; James Tait Black Memorial Prize 1987 (for The Golden Bird). He was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1994 for his novel Beside the Ocean of Time. He grew up in fairly straitened circumstances as his father...

The author's beloved Orkney is brought vividly to life in this classic collection, peopled with crofters, fishermen, ferrymen and tinkers. History plays a part too, for Norse and Scottish legend are revived in tales of witch trials, priest hunts and Viking raids, all endowed with the stark beauty of George Mackay Brown's masterful storytelling.

A compilation of poetry written by George Mackay Brown over a 30-year period, which represents his favourite work. These poems reflect the richness of the Orkney Island community where he lives - a community permeated with its past and still close to the natural world.

These unknown and sometimes unexpected poems by the Orcadian master have all his characteristic simplicity and power.In these poems readers will find new ideas previously unexplored, but they will also find those qualities that made George Mackay Brown different from anyone else.

Twenty-one Days in India is Aberigh-Mackay's most famous work, and is a satire of Anglo-Indian society in the 19th century.

A farm girl with a big imagination turns her landlocked home into an ocean playground in this dreamy picture book for little mermaids everywhere.A little girl dreams of adventures in the water and feels the spirit of the ocean all around her . . . even though she lives on the prairie, with flat land as far as the eye can see. But she won't let a little detail like that stand in the way of being a meadow mermaid! Frolicking in the "waves" of wheat and "ocea...

Before the war! How long shall we go on saying that, I wonder? How long before the answer will be 'Which war?' The approach of the Second World War finds suburban insurance agent George Bowling in a reflective mood. As he thinks back to the sedate Oxfordshire village of his Edwardian boyhood, he contemplates regretfully what has happened to England since then, from the First World War, in which he served, to the seemingly inescapable money-grubbing and mechanization of everyday life in mod...

The History of Witchcraft in Europe' is a compelling anthology that traverses the murky waters of witchcraft's past through a diverse array of literary styles. This collection encapsulates a wide-ranging chronicle from medieval superstitions and the horrors of the witch hunts to the Romantic reinterpretation of witch folklore within a modern scholarly framework. The anthology highlights not only the dark narratives that have swirled around this theme but also represents pivotal transformat...

This popular and interesting book explains how over 2000 towns, villages and lochs in Scotland got their names, with placename origins explained.

The small Orcadian community of Greevoe has remained unchanged for generations. Now a shady government project, Operation Black Star, threatens to destroy the islander's way of life.George Mackay Brown's first novel describes a week in the life of the islanders as the come to terms with the repercussions of Operation Black Star in a masterful mix of prose and poetry from one of Scotland's greatest writers.

When the shopkeeper gives Jenny a skinny, black kitten she has no idea who she has adopted. Fankle is no ordinary cat. The fiercely clever feline has lived six lives so far: lives of adventure, danger, fortune and poverty. He's stared down angry pirates, started a blood feud, won a war, advised an empress and leapt onto the moon. Fankle tells Jenny tales of his former lives -- with the king of pirates, in ancient Egypt and even with the Empress of China. So what is he doing living in a cro...