When young surgeon David Carroll suspects that the mysterious buyers who want to purchase his group’s medical practice are Russian mobsters, he decides to take a stand against them. This decision takes a disastrous turn when the mobsters attack his home, killing his wife and the three FBI agents assigned to protect them. David, although wounded, survives, but is now a prime suspect and is forced to flee. Hunted by the FBI and the Russian mob, David escapes to the one place where he thinks no one will ever find him—a remote shieling or shepherd’s hut in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. As he struggles to survive in the harsh wilderness, David’s refuge is invaded by Catriona Gordon, a young anthropology student who has come to research old shielings. Resentful of each other’s presence, little do either of them realize how Catriona’s deep dive into history will bring the catastrophic events of David’s own past roaring back into the present.

Tree-climbing students, volunteering soldiers, island-bound recluses... The characters in David Constantine’s remarkable new collection are united by an urge to absent themselves, to abscond from the intolerable pressures of normal life and withdraw into strange ideas, political causes, even private languages. Viewed from without, they appear sometimes absurd – like the vicar who starts conversing with the Devil when his wife leaves him – sometimes tragic – like the vision of a suicide being fished out of the River Irwell. Such is the force of Constantine’s compassion, however, we cannot help but follow each character deep into their isolation. And the further we descend, through the strata of each personal history, the ever-changing landscapes that bear down upon them, the more remarkable the discovery, at very bottom, that glimmers of redemption abide; like the babbling springs uncovered in the scars of a quarry that will one day heal it with a lake, or the secret haven of the title story, offering more than physical refuge, but a safe-house for dreams. By the winner of the BBC National Short Story Prize 2010 Shortlisted for the 2010 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award

This book examines the significance of cabins and other temporary seasonal dwellings as important symbols in modern Norwegian cultural and literary history. The author uses Michel Foucault’s notion of the “heterotopia”—an actual place that also functions imaginatively as a kind of real-world utopia—to examine how cabins have signified differently during successive periods, from an Enlightenment trope of simplicity and moderation, through the rise of tourism, into a period of increasing individualism and alienation from nature. For each period discussed, the author relates a widely recognized real world cabin to a cluster of thematically related literary texts from a wide variety of genres. Cabins in Modern Norwegian Literature considers both central canonical works, such as Camilla Collett’s The District Governor’s Daughters, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s Synnøve Solbakken, Henrik Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken, and Knut Hamsun’s The Growth of the Soil, as well as less widely known literary works and texts from marginal genres such as hunting narratives and crime fiction. In addition, the book contains analyses of a few key films from the contemporary period that also activate the cabin as a motif. The central argument is that while Norwegians today tend to think of cabin culture as essentially unchanging over a long span of time, it has in fact changed dramatically over the past two hundred years, and that it is an extremely rich and complex cultural phenomenon deeply imbedded in the construction of national identity.

Transhumance is a form of pastoralism that has been practised around the world since animals were first domesticated. Such seasonal movements have formed an important aspect of many European farming systems for several thousand years, although they have declined markedly since the nineteenth century. Ethnographers and geographers have long been involved in recording transhumant practices, and in the last two decades archaeologists have started to add a new material dimension to the subject. This volume brings together recent advances in the study of European transhumance during historical times, from Sweden to Spain, Romania to Ireland, and beyond that even Newfoundland. While the focus is on the archaeology of seasonal sites used by shepherds and cowherds, the contributions exhibit a high degree of interdisciplinarity. Documentary, cartographic, ethnographic and palaeoecological evidence all play a part in the examination of seasonal movement and settlement in medieval and post-medieval landscapes. Notwithstanding the obvious diversity across Europe in terms of livestock, distances travelled and socio-economic context, an extended introduction to the volume shows that cross-cutting themes are now emerging, including mobility, gendered herding, collective land-use, the agency of non-elite people and competition for grazing and markets. The book will appeal not only to archaeologists, but to historians, geographers, ethnographers, palaeoecologists and anyone interested in rural lifeways across Europe.

Live, Die, Buy, Eat. These words represent a chain of events which today is disconnected. In the past few years, controversies around meat have arisen around industrialization and globalization of meat production, often pivoting around health, environmental issues, and animal welfare. Although meat increasingly figures as a problem, most consumers’ knowledge of animal husbandry and meat production is more absent than ever. Tracing a historical process of alienation along three distinct axes, the authors show how the animal origin of meat is covered up, rationalized, forgotten, excused, neglected, and denied. How is meat produced today, and where? How do we consume meat, and how have our consumption habits changed? Why have these changes occurred, and what are the social and cultural consequences of these changes? Using Norway as a case study, this book examines the dramatic changes in meat production and consumption over the last 150 years. With a wide range of historical sources, together with interviews and observation at farms, slaughterhouses, and production units, as well as analyses of contemporary texts and digital sources, Live, Die, Buy, Eat explores the transformation of animal husbandry, meat production and consumption, together with its cultural consequences. It will appeal to scholars of anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, geography, and history with an interest in food, agriculture, environment, and culture.

Originally published in 1980, this book examines the evolution of the Scottish landscape from pre-historic times to the mid-nineteenth century. It considers the way in which the structural base of agriculture and the changing farming ‘system’ came to alter the Scottish rural landscape. This book, with its focus on the underlying landscape processes, gives a developmental view of landscape change. It therefore considers the crucial question of the rate and pace of landscape change and argues that the Scottish landscape was not the product of a few brief phases of quite rapid development but rather the result of a continual and gradual process of change. It also looks at the regional variation of landscape change and establishes the importance of regional linkages in the diffusion of ideas especially in new technology.

Written around the thirteenth century AD by Icelandic monks, the seven tales collected here offer a combination of pagan elements tightly woven into the pattern of Christian ethics. They take as their subjects figures who are heroic, but do not fit into the mould of traditional heroes. Some stories concern characters in Iceland - among them Hrafknel's Saga, in which a poor man's son is murdered by his powerful neighbour, and Thorstein the Staff-Struck, which describes an ageing warrior's struggle to settle into a peaceful rural community. Others focus on the adventures of Icelanders abroad, including the compelling Audun's Story, which depicts a farmhand's pilgrimage to Rome. These fascinating tales deal with powerful human emotions, suffering and dignity at a time of profound transition, when traditional ideals were gradually yielding to a more peaceful pastoral lifestyle.

The action of the saga takes place at the end of the tenth century, at about the time Scandinavia was converting from worship of Norse gods to Christianity. A masterpiece of medieval literature, the story focuses on two families — that of Hoskuld, a prominent farmer with several sons, and that of Gudrun, the most beautiful woman ever born in Iceland.

The Outer Hebrides lie 40 miles to the west of mainland Scotland, forming a barrier to the North Atlantic. Culturally distinct from early prehistory, the islands contain a wealth of historical and archaeological monuments, including the standing stones at Callanish, the magnificent St Clement’s church at Rodel as well as numerous brochs, castles, Pitish houses, croft houses and industrial and military buildings. In addition to descriptions of key historic sites from prehistory onwards and gazetteers covering every place of historical interest, this book also traces the development of the modern environment and landscape of the islands, enabling the visitor to appreciate the sites within their historical and cultural context.