Tag: fantasy

When her husband the priest dies, Morag loses more than her life partner. With him goes her home and her place in the community. In addition to these misfortunes, in a society that sets great store by lineage, she is challenged about the mysterious identity of her mother, and it is this that sets her on a quest of discovery that comes, at first, upon a blank, but in time leads her to the circle of the island’s ‘Guardians’, who mediate her discovery of her mother’s identity, and, step by step, her own deeper self-knowing and self-acceptance. 

When Aidan, the new priest, undertakes a campaign to upturn the township’s spirituality, which has accommodated older druidical forms alongside the Christ story, both he and the community are set on a collision course. As tension builds the shareg (headman) of the town, must intervene. Finding no way through that conforms to the norms of his world, he must take a radical and unconventional step. 

The book explores mental breakdown (Aidan’s) and severe depression (Morag’s, at the mid-point of the story when she finds herself at an impasse). It reflects religious tensions that have existed historically. It celebrates the natural world and the resilience of the human spirit in resisting a coercive authority. In doing so, Morag steps into her full personhood.

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Ceredigion author A G Rivett claims to have lived several lives in the course of his one life. Born in London, raised in the Home Counties, he has been a doctor, a priest, and a crofter in the Scottish Highlands. He has lived in rural Northern Nigeria and knows what a simpler life looks like, less dependent on technology. He now lives in West Wales with his wife, Gillian Paschkes-Bell, who works with him as a writing team. There, he grows fruit and vegetables and has sewn a wildflower meadow. He has three daughters and two grandsons.

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My thoughts: I felt for Morag, with her husband’s death she loses not only her partner but her home and her standing in the village. With nowhere for her, she leaves to travel back to the place she grew up, hoping to find a home there. She has questions about her mother’s identity that she alone cannot answer and on her quest for a new home, she must also reckon with her past. Meeting the Guardians helps her, and gives her guidance, but the rest is up to her.

At a point in her life where she might have expected stability and the quiet comforts of home and family, she is thrust into a quest for answers about her past and her future.

Meanwhile the new priest must contend with the islanders unique belief system, his own ambitions and try to find a place in this community that is wary of outsiders. Aiden must attempt to master the challenges of his role and rise to the beliefs his church leaders have in him.

Morag and Aidan are a study in contrast, both are starting again at points in their lives they did not expect and must overcome others’ assumptions about them and their place in the world as well as contend with their own personal internal worries.

It’s another interesting study of change and belief, as with Morag’s adopted son in The Seaborne.

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.

John Finlay is fleeing from failure. His engineering business has failed. His relationship has failed. His flight from debts leads him to disaster – and to the Island, where he must learn to live anew.

Dermot, pulling a boy barely alive from the water, has never seen anyone so strangely dressed. His Celtic island knows nothing of debt, nor engineering. Where has this man come from?

John struggles to accept that he has been carried across time and into another world – both like and unlike his own. How he got there is a mystery. But John, the foreigner, must turn slowly into Dhion, the Islander.

Still, he brings with him unfinished business that must be faced, and ideas that may not always be welcomed. Meanwhile Dermot, consumed with a growing jealousy, develops his own deadly agenda.

The whole community finds itself caught up in what becomes a matter of survival – or transformation. A tale of loss and change. A spiritual inquiry. And a love story.

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Ceredigion author A G Rivett claims to have lived several lives in the course of his one life. Born in London, raised in the Home Counties, he has been a doctor, a priest, and a crofter in the Scottish Highlands. He has lived in rural Northern Nigeria and knows what a simpler life looks like, less dependent on technology. He now lives in West Wales with his wife, Gillian Paschkes-Bell, who works with him as a writing team. There, he grows fruit and vegetables and has sewn a wildflower meadow. He has three daughters and two grandsons.

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My thoughts: John finds himself on an island that might be a bit like a lost Scottish/Irish one, where people speak  sort of Gaelic/Celtic language, where Christianity has mixed into their traditional beliefs, and where they still believe in the sidhe (the fae/faeries/fair folk) as well as God the Father and Gaia the Mother.

John is unable at first to communicate with his rescuers, they don’t understand his modern English, too far removed from its mish-mashed roots in Latin, French, Greek and Germanic languages. He slowly learns their language and tries to adapt to the very different way of living, something closer to the way people lived a thousand years ago or so when the Anglo-Saxons and Norse lived in England.

As he adjusts to the island life, he forms relationships with some of the villagers he lives among, attempts to find work he can do, as an engineer he’s keen to build things and introduce some technology to the place. One of the young women becomes interested in him, and this adds to the enmity Dermot, a young man there, begins to feel, seeing John as his rival. A rivalry John does not feel. 

Offered a chance to return to his own time and world, John must choose the life he has found on the island, or the one he was running from – his business, his family and Helen, the woman he left behind. Can he start again there or has the life he has begun to build amongst the islanders become his real life? 

An interesting and imaginative book, would we, if offered a similar chance to begin somewhere new, choose it or return to our technologically advanced but disconnected one? Thought-provoking and intriguing.  

*I was kindly gifted a copy of the book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.