Morna works as a cleaner in Edinburgh. She spends her time drinking, attempting affairs and trying to work out the mind of the twenty-year-old son with whom she shares her flat. Her elder brother, Athol, lives near Glasgow airport with his wife. The owner of a floor-tiling company, with two grown-up children, he's proud of his hard-won achievements since moving west. Between them, they have differing memories of their upbringing and their parents and definite opinions about each other. But these are left unsaid because Morna and Athol haven't spoken a word to each other in fourteen years . . . When Morna's son Joshua travels to see his uncle, he sets off a remarkable and life-changing series of events. A Slow Air by David Harrower premiered at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, in April 2011, and transferred to the Traverse Theatre as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

This collection is drawn from Ken Kolodner's extensive library of arrangements for the hammered dulcimer, developed from over 30 years of teaching thousands ofworkshops. This second book in this two-book companion collection includes traditional and original waltzes, slow airs, marches and O'Carolan. The repertoire draws primarily from the traditional music of the United States (Old-Time), Ireland, Scotland, Quebec, Cape Breton, England, Finland, Sweden, Chile and Israel. Each tune is presented as a simple melody with chord progression along with one or more detailed arrangements, offering a wide range of levels of complexity. Backup and harmony parts are provided for many of the pieces. The book is intended to be a lifetime resource for players of all levels. Kolodner is widely known as one of the most prominent teachers and performers of the hammered dulcimer and is especially known for his teaching of arranging and backup techniques.

In folk tradition, stories of love lost, betrayal, jealousy, conflict, emigration, and the supernatural are often immortalized in songs of many traditions, demonstrating that singing has been a universal vehicle for the human condition. the criteria for this wonderful collection of prose and melodies is from Celtic traditions that have been with us for hundreds of years. These compositions have been arranged so that each will work both as an air and as a song. All of the selections in the book appear on the companion CD.

Robin Robertson's new collection reveals the same talent we saw in his debut A Painted Field. His main subject is his own detached, fierce, Scottish eye: on landscape and sea, on love, sex and violence.

The Ottawa Valley is a region of Canada straddling the Ottawa River in Ontario and Québec that is well known for its rich singing, storytelling, fiddling and step dancing traditions. Settled largely by the Irish, Scots and the French over the past two hundred years, it had largest concentration of people of Irish origin in Canada by the late 19th century. Travelling through the Valley one gets the sense of coming face to face with the past. While its dramatic history is filled with incidents of extreme hardship and tragedy, the overriding impression is of a triumphant survivalism associated with its strong men of the past; the voyageurs, the coureurs du bois and the lumbermen. The legacy of this unique heritage—from fiddling and step dancing to tales of priests, lumberman, and Orange and Green rivalries—is explored in this book through the voices of Valley people themselves. The author reveals the importance of place and history in the transmission of this vibrant regional culture down to the present day.

A full-bodied novel of love, family-and single malt scotch.

(Music Sales America). This book is a major collection of traditional Irish slow airs that captures the essence and beauty of Irish traditional music. Included in the 118 airs that make up this fabulous compilation, are some of the great sean-nos (old style) airs as well as tunes by Caloran and other favorite and well-known pieces. Author Tomas O'Canainn has a lifetime of experience both performing and teaching Irish music and his selection of beautiful, soaring and majestic slow airs is ideal for extending your repertoire for any melody instrument. These relatively easy pieces are also suitable for those approaching Irish slow airs for the first time. Includes access to online audio, presenting every tune in the book played by the author and an ensemble of expert traditional musicians so you can hear how the pieces should sound.

A New York Times Bestseller A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2020 Named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR “A fascinating scientific, cultural, spiritual and evolutionary history of the way humans breathe—and how we’ve all been doing it wrong for a long, long time.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Big Magic and Eat Pray Love No matter what you eat, how much you exercise, how skinny or young or wise you are, none of it matters if you’re not breathing properly. There is nothing more essential to our health and well-being than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat twenty-five thousand times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences. Journalist James Nestor travels the world to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. The answers aren’t found in pulmonology labs, as we might expect, but in the muddy digs of ancient burial sites, secret Soviet facilities, New Jersey choir schools, and the smoggy streets of São Paulo. Nestor tracks down men and women exploring the hidden science behind ancient breathing practices like Pranayama, Sudarshan Kriya, and Tummo and teams up with pulmonary tinkerers to scientifically test long-held beliefs about how we breathe. Modern research is showing us that making even slight adjustments to the way we inhale and exhale can jump-start athletic performance; rejuvenate internal organs; halt snoring, asthma, and autoimmune disease; and even straighten scoliotic spines. None of this should be possible, and yet it is. Drawing on thousands of years of medical texts and recent cutting-edge studies in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry, and human physiology, Breath turns the conventional wisdom of what we thought we knew about our most basic biological function on its head. You will never breathe the same again.

A bestseller in France and winner of the Prix Renaudot, By a Slow River is a mesmerizing and atmospheric tale of three mysterious deaths in an oddly isolated French village during World War I.The placid daily life of a small town near the front seems impervious to the nearby pounding of artillery fire and the parade of wounded strangers passing through its streets. But the illusion of calm is soon shattered by the deaths of three innocents–the charming new schoolmistress who captures every male heart only to kill herself; an angelic ten-year-old girl who is found strangled; and a local policeman’s cherished wife, who dies alone in labor while her husband is hunting the murderer. Twenty years later, the policeman still struggles to make sense of these tragedies, a struggle that both torments and sustains him. But excavating the town's secret history will bring neither peace to him nor justice to the wicked. From the Trade Paperback edition.