The Flood
Author(s): 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 bastardson, 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.
Product Information
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... THE FLOOD was unavailable for almost twenty years - now published with a new introduction by the author. Ian Rankin is a Sunday Times No.1 bestselling author and Guardian fastseller. In 2005 he was awarded the CWA Diamond Dagger. He also won Crime Thriller of the Year at the British Book Awards 2005. Rankin now makes up more than 10% of all UK crime sales and always gets fantastic reviews: 'The themes that would come to dominate the Rebus books are already here in embryonic form: the blurred boundaries between good and evil; the pull of superstition and myth; the difficulties in escaping and resolving one's past; the emotional complexities of the male of the species; and, not least, a good mystery' Time Out. 'As always, Rankin proves himself the master of his own milieu ... There cannot be a better crime novelist writing' Daily Mail. 'No one writes more gripping stories than Rankin' TLS
Born in the Kingdom of Fife in 1960, Ian Rankin graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1982, and then spent three years writing novels when he was supposed to be working towards a PhD in Scottish Literature. His first Rebus novel was published in 1987, and the Rebus books are now translated into twenty-two languages and are bestsellers on several continents. Ian Rankin has been elected a Hawthornden Fellow, and is also a past winner of the Chandler-Fulbright Award. He is the recipient of four Crime Writers' Association Dagger Awards including the prestigious Diamond Dagger in 2005. In 2004, Ian won America's celebrated Edgar Award for 'Resurrection Men'. He has also been shortlisted for the Edgar and Anthony Awards in the USA, and won Denmark's Palle Rosenkrantz Prize, the French Grand Prix du Roman Noir and the Deutscher Krimipreis. Ian Rankin is also the recipient of honorary degrees from the universities of Abertay, St Andrews and Edinburgh. A contributor to BBC2's 'Newsnight Review', he also presented his own TV series, 'Ian Rankin's Evil Thoughts'. He recently received the OBE for services to literature, opting to receive the prize in his home city of Edinburgh, where he lives with his partner and two sons.
General Fields
- :
- : Orion Publishing Co
- : Orion (an Imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd )
- : 0.181
- : July 2006
- : United Kingdom
- : books
Special Fields
- : 288
- : 823.914
- : 1
- : Paperback
- : Ian Rankin