This is a bewitching and atmospheric collection of short stories celebrating life and love: the world ripens as a baby stirs in its mother's womb; a soldier captured at Bannockburn sees the daughter of his jailor bathing and falls in love; two ghosts become reconciled with death; and, an eighteenth-century tale of piracy and treachery. George Mackay Brown's distinctive voice has a clarity and resonance that blends the magical with the mundane, and the present with the past.