Sally Magnusson

'A remarkable feat of imagination... I enjoyed and admired it in equal measure' Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent 'An extraordinarily immersive read, that emphasises the power of stories, examining themes of motherhood, identity, exile and freedom ... a journey that not only crosses continents, but encompasses tragedy and rich sensuality' Guardian 'A powerful tale of Barbary pirates ... richly imagined.' Sunday Times 'Engrossing' Sunday Express 'Fascinating ... a really, really good read' BBC R2 Book Club 'The best sort of historical novel.' Scotsman 'A lyrical tale' Stylist 'A poetic retelling of Icelandic history.' Daily Mail 'Compelling stuff' Good Housekeeping In 1627 Barbary pirates raided the coast of Iceland and abducted some 400 of its people, including 250 from a tiny island off the mainland. Among the captives sold into slavery in Algiers were the island pastor, his wife and their three children. Although the raid itself is well documented, little is known about what happened to the women and children afterwards. It was a time when women everywhere were largely silent. In this brilliant reimagining, Sally Magnusson gives a voice to Ásta, the pastor's wife. Enslaved in an alien Arab culture Ásta meets the loss of both her freedom and her children with the one thing she has brought from home: the stories in her head. Steeped in the sagas and folk tales of her northern homeland, she finds herself experiencing not just the separations and agonies of captivity, but the reassessments that come in any age when intelligent eyes are opened to other lives, other cultures and other kinds of loving. The Sealwoman's Gift is about the eternal power of storytelling to help us survive. The novel is full of stories - Icelandic ones told to fend off a slave-owner's advances, Arabian ones to help an old man die. And there are others, too: the stories we tell ourselves to protect our minds from what cannot otherwise be borne, the stories we need to make us happy. 'Icelandic history has been brought to extraordinary life... An accomplished and intelligent novel' Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, author of Why Did You Lie? 'Vivid and compelling' Adam Nichols, co-translator of The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson

The Sealwoman's Gift

'WONDERFUL. ONE NEVER MESSES WITH THE FAERIES' Melanie Reid, The Times 'AN ABSOLUTE TRIUMPH' Sarah Haywood, author of The Cactus 'EXTRAORDINARILY VIVD' Michelle Gallen, author of Big Girl Small Town A spellbinding novel combining Scottish folklore with hidden history, by the Sunday Times bestselling author Sally Magnusson. Loch Katrine waterworks, 1856. A Highland wilderness fast becoming an industrial wasteland. No place for a lady. Isabel Aird is aghast when her husband is appointed doctor to an extraordinary waterworks being built miles from the city. But Isabel, denied the motherhood role that is expected of her by a succession of miscarriages, finds unexpected consolations in a place where she can feel the presence of her unborn children and begin to work out what her life in Victorian society is for. The hills echo with the gunpowder blasts of hundreds of navvies tunnelling day and night to bring clean water to diseased Glasgow thirty miles away - digging so deep that there are those who worry they are disturbing the land of faery itself. Here, just inside the Highland line, the membrane between the modern world and the ancient unseen places is very thin. With new life quickening within her again, Isabel can only wait. But a darker presence has also emerged from the gunpowder smoke. And he is waiting too. Inspired by the mysterious death of the seventeenth-century minister Robert Kirke and set in a pivotal era two centuries later when engineering innovation flourished but women did not, The Ninth Child blends folklore with historical realism in a spellbinding narrative. *PRAISE FOR THE SEALWOMAN'S GIFT* 'I enjoyed and admired it in equal measure' Sarah Perry 'An extraordinarily immersive read' Guardian 'Richly imagined and energetically told' Sunday Times 'An epic journey' Zoe Ball Book Club

The new novel from the author of The Sealwoman's Gift

The Ninth Child

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER - AS HEARD ON BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK 'The tenuous but vital reconnection between a child and its mother' - The Sunday Times Facebook.com/WhereMemoriesGo Scottish broadcaster and author Sally Magnusson cared with her two sisters for their mother Mamie during many years of living with dementia. Sad and funny, wise and honest, this deeply intimate account of insidious losses and unexpected joys is also a call to arms that challenges us all to think differently. This book began as an attempt to hold on to my witty, storytelling mother with the one thing I had to hand. Words. Then, as the enormity of the social crisis my family was part of began to dawn, I wrote with the thought that other forgotten lives might be nudged into the light along with hers. Dementia is one of the greatest social, medical, economic, scientific, philosophical and moral challenges of our times. I am a reporter. It became the biggest story of my life. - Sally Magnusson Regarded as one of the finest journalists of her generation, Mamie Baird Magnusson's whole life was a celebration of words - words that she fought to retain in the grip of a disease which is fast becoming the scourge of the 21st century. Married to writer and broadcaster Magnus Magnusson, they had five children of whom Sally is the eldest. As well as chronicling the anguish, the frustrations and the unexpected laughs and joys that she and her sisters experienced while accompanying their beloved mother on the long dementia road for eight years until her death in 2012, Sally Magnusson seeks understanding from a range of experts and asks penetrating questions about how we treat older people, how we can face one of the greatest social, medical, economic and moral challenges of our times, and what it means to be human. An extraordinary and deeply personal memoir, a manifesto and a call to arms, in one searingly beautiful narrative.

Why Dementia Changes Everything

Where Memories Go

A lifetime ago Jamesina Ross wrote songs about the land and the kin who had lived and worked on it for generations. She dreamed of sharing stories about the life and land she loved. But her music was no match for the violence her friends and family faced as they were forcibly removed from their homes in what became known as the Highland Clearances. 

She builds a new life, of sorts, in a tenement flat in Rutherglen. She tries not to think about all that she's lost. But when she takes in a lodger, he tries to convince her that if she would only dare to remember the past, she might have the chance of a future. 

Music in the Dark

A frank and humorous encyclopedic history of the forgotten life of urine and its many uses in society. Alchemists sought gold in it. David Bowie refrigerated it to ward off evil. In the trenches of Ypres soldiers used it as a gas mask, whereas modern-day terrorists add it to home-made explosives. All the Fullers, Tuckers and Walkers in the phonebook owe their names to it, and in 1969 four bags for storing it were left on the surface of the moon. Bought and sold, traded and transported, even carried to work in jugs, urine has made bread rise, beer foam and given us gunpowder, stained glass, Robin Hood’s tights, and Vermeer’s Girl With A Pearl Earring. And we do produce an awful lot of it. Humans alone make almost enough to replace the entire contents of Loch Lomond every year. Add the incalculable volume contributed by the rest of the animal kingdom and it might soon displace a small ocean. No wonder it gets everywhere. In Life of Pee Sally Magnusson unveils the secret history of civilization’s most unsavory and unsung hero, and discovers how our urine footprint is just as indelible as our carbon one.

The Story of How Urine Got Everywhere

Life of Pee

A spellbinding novel combining Scottish folklore with hidden history, by the Sunday Times bestselling author Sally Magnusson. Loch Katrine waterworks, 1856. A Highland wilderness fast becoming an industrial wasteland. No place for a lady. Isabel Aird is aghast when her husband is appointed doctor to an extraordinary waterworks being built miles from the city. But Isabel, denied the motherhood role that is expected of her by a succession of miscarriages, finds unexpected consolations in a place where she can feel the presence of her unborn children and begin to work out what her life in Victorian society is for. The hills echo with the gunpowder blasts of hundreds of navvies tunnelling day and night to bring clean water to diseased Glasgow thirty miles away - digging so deep that there are those who worry they are disturbing the land of faery itself. Here, just inside the Highland line, the membrane between the modern world and the ancient unseen places is very thin. With new life quickening within her again, Isabel can only wait. But a darker presence has also emerged from the gunpowder smoke. And he is waiting too. Inspired by the mysterious death of the seventeenth-century minister Robert Kirke and set in a pivotal era two centuries later when engineering innovation flourished but women did not, The Ninth Child blends folklore with historical realism in a spellbinding narrative. *PRAISE FOR THE SEALWOMAN'S GIFT* 'I enjoyed and admired it in equal measure' Sarah Perry 'An extraordinarily immersive read' Guardian 'Richly imagined and energetically told' Sunday Times 'An epic journey in every sense: although it's historical, it's incredibly relevant to our world today' Zoe Ball Book Club

The New Novel from the Author of the Sealwoman's Gift

Church House (Bridgeton, Scotland)

Church House in Glasgow is a very special youth club. This is a story of determination and faith set against the changing face of the city. Though the tenements and jeelie-pieces are replaced by high-rise blocks and ghetto-blasters, the underlying deprivation lingers.

The Story of Church House in Bridgeton

A Shout in the Street

Pastorova žena

Eric Liddell was Scotland's finest athlete. At the height of his fame he slipped quietly out of the limelight to become a missionary in China, where he later came to an unpleasant end in a Japanese internment camp. This book tells his story.

Sally Magnusson

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