The Ninth Child – A spellbinding novel combining Scottish folklore with hidden history (Paperback)

Our summary description

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In 1856, the hills around Loch Katrine are torn open to feed a growing city. Gunpowder shakes the ground day and night as navvies carve tunnels through what was once Highland wilderness. Isabel Aird arrives unwillingly, following her husband to the vast new waterworks and into a landscape that feels hostile to women and quietly unwelcoming to grief.

In The Ninth Child, Isabel’s private sorrow shapes her response to this place. Repeated miscarriages have denied her the role Victorian society expects, yet among the blasted rock and rising water she senses a different kind of presence. The land seems thin here, stretched between industrial ambition and something far older, a place where loss does not vanish but waits.

As work pushes deeper into the hills, rumours gather of disturbed faery ground and darker forces stirred by noise and smoke. The novel weaves industrial history with folklore, attentive to women’s inner lives and unspoken pain. The Ninth Child is a quiet, unsettling meditation on motherhood, belief, and what is uncovered when progress digs too far into the past.