Howling Frog Books

Beside the Ocean of Time, by George Mackay Brown I like to listen to the Slightly Foxed podcast, which has added quite a few things to my reading wishlist. A while back, they did an episode on George Mackay Brown (pronounced MaKEE), who is mainly considered a poet -- one of the greats of 20th century Scottish literature -- but who wrote stories, essays, and plays as well.  He was from the Orkney islands, and those islands were very important to his writing.  This 1995 novel is Brown's last, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Thorfinn Ragnarsson lives on the tiny island of Norday* -- it's the 1930s, and Thorfinn is known as the laziest, most useless boy on the island, because he prefers to spend his time daydreaming, imagining himself in other times.  In imagination, Thorfinn sails with his Viking ancestors and rides to the Battle of Bannockburn.  Stories of other islanders are interspersed with Thorfinn's voyages, and we even see the island in 'the future,...

The Bride of Lammermoor, by Sir Walter Scott The Classics Club issued a dare to pick a spooky classic from our lists to read.  My CC list has already had most of the spooky classics taken, but I did have one left: The Bride of Lammermoor, by Sir Walter Scott.  I knew it featured a bride who goes mad and stabs somebody, and that an opera, Lucia di Lammermoor , was based on the novel.  Also, the novel was published in 1819.  But it's historical fiction, set at the end of the 17th century, over 100 years before Scott wrote it. Edgar, Master of Ravenswood, has been dispossessed of his ancestral property.  His father was a Jacobite and was stripped of his title and everything else, too.  Edgar has a single tower left to him, Wolfs Crag, and no money whatsoever.  He has to find a job overseas, because he's certainly not welcome in Scotland, but first he would like to take his revenge upon the man who persecuted his father and then got all the property:...