The Gathering Night - Tapa blanda

Audacious. As warm and inviting as a hot spring on a clear winter's day. * * The Times (on The Sea Road) * * Gripping, its mix of reality and myth reminiscent of Louis de Bernieres. * * Scotland on Sunday (on Hy Brasil) * * A pacy, colourful and intelligent epic. -- Boyd Tonkin * * Independent (on Voyageurs) * * The heart of this novel is a place described so finely and so beguilingly that everyone who reads it will want to go there. -- Helen Dunmore * * The Times (on Light) * * Elphinstone creates a richly imagined world. -- Susan Mansfield * * The Scotsman * * A brilliant fictional evocation of a time that's usually given short shrift in history books . . . At the core of The Gathering Night is a very human story, a complex tale of love, revenge, murder and honour, a book that managed to be both gripping in terms of plot, engaging with character psychology and a hugely evocative exploration of time and place. -- Doug Johnstone * * List * * The Gathering Night offers us a totem plot centred roudn ideas of identity, interdependence and our own here-and-now. Where our experience diverges from the Auk People and our hunter-gatherer heritage, Elphinstone turns Go-between. -- Jen Hadfield * * Scottish Review of Books * * Employing her considerable skills as a historical novelist, Elphinstone imagines the lives of the hunter-gatherers who thrived in the period from the end of the Ice Age until the adoption of agriculture . . . Imagination is well-woven with avid research . . . The reader is ultimately engaged by Elphinstone's beguiling prose to listen well to the strange stories of struggle, stoicism and survival coursing throughout this challenging novel. -- Anita Sethi * * Independent on Sunday * * Elphinstone is a fine purveyor or evocative literary historical fiction . . . Excellently researched, it wears that knowledge lightly, concentrating on the human heart of the tale. * * Big Issue * * A cracking story. -- Graeme Warren * * British Archaeology Magazine * * A vivid tale . . . both lyrical and matter-of-fact, at times touched with humour . . . Perhaps the most telling achievement of The Gathering Night is that it persuades us to accept its entirely different value-system without a qualm, and even to regret that humanity ever thought of swapping the hunter's spear for the tiller's spade. -- Adam Thorpe * * Guardian * *

Between Grandmother Mountain and the cold sea, Alaia and her family live off the land. But when one of her brothers goes hunting and never returns, the fragile balance of life is upset. Half-starved and maddened with grief, Alaia's mother follows her visions and goes in search of her lost son. Then a stranger from a rival tribe appears on their hearth seeking shelter. Are his stories of a great wave and a people perished really to be believed? What else could drive a man to travel alone between tribes in the depths of winter? Hopes of resolution come when Alaia's mother returns home as a Go-Between, one able to commune with the spirits. But as all the Auk people come together for their annual Gathering Night, who there will listen to the voice of a woman? The Gathering Night is a story of conflict, loss, love, adventure and devastating natural disasters. This utterly enchanting pre-historical novel is set deep in our stone-age past, but resonates as a parable of our troubled planet 8000 years on.