The Flood
Mary Miller has always been an outcast. As a young girl she had fallen into the hot burn—a torrent of warm chemical run-off from the local coal mine. Fished out white-haired and half-dead, she was initially treated with sympathy. But all that changed when the young man who pushed her in died in an accident down the mines just two days later. From then on she was regarded with a mixture of suspicion and fascination by her God-fearing community.
Now, many years later she is hardly less alone. She is the mother of a bastard son, Sandy, and caught up in a faltering affair with a local schoolteacher. Sandy, meanwhile, has fallen in love with a strange homeless girl. But the search for happiness isn't easy. Both mother and son are gradually being forced to come to terms with the past and a dark secret from Mary's childhood. All this in the growing knowledge that their small dramas are being played out against a much larger canvas, glimpsed only in symbols and flickering images—of decay and regrowth, of fire and water—of the flood.
Readers also enjoyed
Ian Rankin
Born in the Kingdom of Fife in 1960, Ian Rankin graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1982, and then spent three years writing novels when he was supposed to be working towards a PhD in Scottish Literature.
After university and before his success with his Rebus novels, Ian had a number of jobs including working as a grape-picker, a swineherd, a journalist for a hi-fi magazine, and a taxman. Following his marriage in 1986, he lived briefly in London where he worked at the National Folktale Centre, followed by a short time living in France, before returning to Edinburgh.
More books by Ian Rankin
