The Wind from the Hills
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Jessica Stirling continues the epic of love, greed and betrayal that began in The Island Wife in her magnificent novel, The Wind from the Hills.
For Innis and Biddy, daughters of the embittered Vassie Campbell, life has changed greatly from the days when they were poor crofters. Innis, the mother of three young children, has found that marriage to handsome Michael Tarrant is utterly different from the idyll she expected. And Biddy has become only too accustomed to being a wealthy widow who keeps herself aloof from both the life she once knew and her dead husband's family.
But though the sisters' lives seem set, they are destined to change once more. For Innis, a temptation to a better life may have to come too late--and for Biddy, courted by an ardent new suitor, happiness may have come at last.
Set against the background of an island off the coast of Scotland that is being forced half-willingly into a new era, the story of the two very different sisters and their very different longings is one of the most memorable that Jessica Stirling has created.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The lives and loves of two Scottish sisters, Innis and Biddy Campbell, propel the second installment of Stirling's deservedly popular Isle of Mull trilogy (after The Island Wife). No longer poor, the two crofter's daughters find themselves at the end of the 19th century in contrasting marital situations, with which they have vastly different ways of coping. Beautiful Biddy is now a wealthy but childless widow who tries out prospective husbands by recklessly testing their fertility; Innis, who converted to Catholicism, doggedly obeys her sour and silent shepherd husband, Michael Tarrant, a former lover of Biddy's. When a widower schoolmaster, Gillies Brown, and his brood move into the isolated island town and reopen the village school, simmering secrets rise to the surface. Innis must question both her marriage and her faith when she falls hard for Gillies; Biddy must decide once for all whom she will choose to marry. When a bright teenage cousin, Donnie, shows up at Biddy's house to attend Gillies's school, the boy takes an awkward place as Biddy's substitute son; he reminds her of her late brother, and of her awful past. Their acerbic, tough old mother, Vassie, secretly has her hand behind the events in her daughters' lives, and their horrid father, Ronan, is finally put away. Majordomo Willy Naismith works hard to protect Biddy's interests, and meanwhile her grandfather's second-in-command, Robert Quigley, has his own plans for one of the sisters, and for Donnie. Stirling's roundly realized characters are delineated in sharp, affectionate portrayals; even the cattle dogs acquire personalities. The setting--the harsh but beautiful Hebrides and the insular town of Crove--infuses the narrative with richly melancholic yet hearty realism.
