FLOOD, THE by Ian Rankin - SIGNED FIRST EDITION THUS UK BOOK
See all titles by Ian Rankin.
Ian Rankin's first ever novel - unavailable for nearly twenty years and now republished with a brand-new introduction.
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.
