The flood
Rankin, Ian2005
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This is Ian Rankin's first ever novel, now re-published with a brand-new introduction. 'The Flood' is both a coming-of-age novel and an amazing portrait of a time and place. In 1986, a small Scottish publishing firm released a first novel by a talented young writer. Only a few hundred copies were printed but it was a literary milestone nonetheless. The book was THE FLOOD. The author was Ian Rankin... Mary Miller had always been an outcast. As a young girl she had fallen into the hot burn - a torrent of warm chemical run-off from the local coal mine. Fished out white-haired and half-dead, sympathy for her quickly faded when the young man who pushed her in died in a mining accident just two days later. From then on she was regarded with a mixture of suspicion and fascination by her God-fearing community. Now, years later she is hardly less alone. She is the mother of a bastard son, Sandy, and caught up in a faltering affair with a local teacher. Sandy, meanwhile, has fallen in love with a strange homeless girl. The search for happiness isn't easy. Both mother and son must face a dark secret from their past, in the growing knowledge that their small dramas are being played out against a much larger canvas, glimpsed only in symbols and flickering images - of decay and regrowth, of fire and water - of the flood. THE FLOOD is both a coming-of-age novel and an amazing portrait of a time and place. Proto-Rankin as it is, it's dark, atmospheric and powerful - a remarkable debut from a remarkable author.
Main title:
The flood / Ian Rankin.
Author:
Imprint:
London : Orion, 2005.
Collation:
xviii, 205 p. ; 24 cm.
Notes:
Originally published: Edinburgh: Polygon, 1986.
ISBN:
9780752873091 (hbk)
Dewey class:
823.914FIC
Language:
English
Subject:
BRN:
2168251