Swim the Moon
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A haunting tale of love, music, and magic on the stormy coast of Scotland.
After the loss of his wife, Scottish fiddle player Richard Brennan moves to Australia to escape the ghosts of his former life. Six years later, he returns for his father's funeral and decides to remain in his father's desolate cottage in the north of Scotland, gathering together the threads of his former life, scratching out a living playing music.
Then Richard meets Ailish, the enigmatic young woman who's ethereal singing haunts the bay by moonlight.
As their relationship builds, the secrets of his family's past are brought to light, one by one, leaving them to confront a history that is both terrifying and fantastic-a legacy that may well cost Richard his soul.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
By turns tender and tormented, this haunting, lyric Celtic rhapsody on the ancient theme of selkies seal-people who in human form ensnare their mortal lovers makes a bewitching debut novel. A little shaky dialogue doesn't mar the beauty of this mythic tale at all. Mysteriously drawn back to the remote cottage in northernmost Scotland where his male ancestors and his wife have all died by drowning, Richard Brennan experiences nightmares of grief and guilt that counterpoint his joy to be "home," playing fiddle in "sessions" around the countryside. Alone in the isolated bothy (cottage) alive with ghosts, Brennan fears for his sanity, his mind tormented by ghastly visions of the sodden corpses of his forefathers, but eventually his psychic wounds start to heal. When lovely, enigmatic Ailish appears at the seaside, dancing and singing rapturously in the silvery Scottish moonlight, Brennan joins his music and his soul to hers. Given how closely the author's last name resembles his hero's, one has to wonder whether an autobiographical element animates this eerie tale of love and loss. Brennan's music comes wondrously alive in rhythmic prose and elusively shifting imagery, proving that myth and legend are inseparable parts of being a folk musician. In the old songs, pain and delight together shape human life. One pays for the other, as the bards know, "when sea-girls wake us, and we drown." Definitely a writer to watch, Brandon has a vivid, original voice, full of poignant longing and haunting echoes.
