'WONDERFUL. ONE NEVER MESSES WITH THE FAERIES' Melanie Reid, The Times
'AN ABSOLUTE TRIUMPH' Sarah Haywood, author of The Cactus
'EXTRAORDINARILY VIVID' 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 Childblends 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

• We started tracking this book on August 17, 2019.
• This book was £16.99 when we started tracking it.
• The price of this book has changed 31 times in the past 2,251 days.
• The current price of this book is £2.99 last checked 7 hours ago.
• This book is at its lowest price in the past 90 days.
• This lowest price this book has been offered at in the past year is £0.99.
• The lowest price to date was £0.99 last reached on March 1, 2025.
• This book has been £0.99 7 times since we started tracking it.
• The highest price to date was £16.99 last reached on August 17, 2019.
• This book has been £16.99 one time since we started tracking it.

• Literature & FictionHistorical FictionFantasy
• Science Fiction & FantasyFantasyHistorical
• Science Fiction & FantasyFantasyFairy Tales

• Publication Date: March 19, 2020
• Text-to-Speech: Disabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 303 Pages
• File Size: 36 KB