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A powerful journey of sea and self, trial and hope on the islands of Shetland When a seed falls from a vine in the tropics and is carried by ocean currents across the Atlantic to the shores of Western Europe - it is known as a sea bean. It is still considered lucky to find a sea bean on the shore, they have been used as magical charms for more than a thousand years. Sally's search for a sea bean begins not long after she moves to the windswept archipelago of Shetland. When pregnancy triggers a chronic illness and forces her to slow down, Sally takes to the beaches. There she discovers treasure freighted with story and curiosities that connect her to the world. The wild shores of Shetland offer glimpses of orcas swimming through the ocean at dusk, the chance to release a tiny storm petrel into the dark of the night and a path of hope. This beachcombing path takes her from the Faroese archipelago to the Orkney islands, and the Dutch island of Texel. It opens a world of ancient myths, fragile ecology, and deep human history. It brings her to herself again. Sea Bean is a message in a bottle. An interconnection of our oceans, communities and ourselves, and an invitation to feel belonging when we are adrift.

Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality they slip gradually from obsession to corruption and betrayal, and at last—inexorably—into evil.

After Culloden, Iain MacGillivray was left for dead on Drumossie Moor. Wounded, his face brutally slashed, he survived only by pretending to be dead as the Redcoats patrolled the corpses of his Jacobite comrades. Six years later, with the clan chiefs routed and the Highlands subsumed into the British state, Iain lives a quiet life, working as a bookseller in Inverness. One day, after helping several of his regular customers, he notices a stranger lurking in the upper gallery of his shop, poring over his collection. But the man refuses to say what he's searching for and only leaves when Iain closes for the night. The next morning Iain opens up shop and finds the stranger dead, his throat cut, and the murder weapon laid out in front of him - a sword with a white cockade on its hilt, the emblem of the Jacobites. With no sign of the killer, Iain wonders whether the stranger discovered what he was looking for - and whether he paid for it with his life. He soon finds himself embroiled in a web of deceit and a series of old scores to be settled in the ashes of war.