Grimoire: New Scottish Folk Tales (Paperback)

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Grimoire: New Scottish Folk Tales draws on the idea of the grimoire as a book of summons, calling strange forces into the everyday world. In this collection, poet Robin Robertson and his brother Tim Robertson create unsettling new tales rooted in Scotland’s folklore and landscape.

These stories focus on ordinary lives disrupted without warning. A moment slips, a boundary weakens, and violence, madness or retribution follows. Second sight appears where it is least welcome. Witches, ghosts, selkies, changelings and doubles emerge not as distant myths but as presences woven into modern experience.

Tim Robertson’s stark accompanying images echo the rawness of the stories, giving them the feel of marks left behind rather than illustrations. Together, text and image reflect a landscape that is never neutral. Grimoire captures the elemental character of Scotland itself, where beauty and threat exist side by side, and where a change in conditions can turn familiarity into terror.