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'We are the land. The elements that created the land live in our bodies. We are born, we bring to birth, and we die, and the land takes us. There is no difference. What is done to us is also done to the land, and what is done to the land is the thing which is done to us. There is nothing else.'

Naomi, the enigmatic fiddler, arrives in Clachanpluck, bringing her music and the ominous potential of an incomer. Her unexpected arrival enriches this remote forest village even as she disrupts it. This is a story of an all-consuming love of the land; the power of friendship; the seasonal round of creation and death; and the physical thrill of storm and rhythm, fire and candlelight. The impending sense of catastrophe - global and personal - which haunts this world, finally erupts in violence: trust and love are the casualties.

The Incomer follows in the tradition of the ballads: fantasy gilds the mundane and the ordinary is made extraordinary.

'A beautifully imagined society with its holistic pantheism and imbued with the sense of the power of music.' The Scotsman

'An immensely satisfying book to read because of its rich symbolism and allegorical qualities.In reading a book such as this with the female re-instated, we realise how much of woman and her psyche has been expunged from Western literature.' Cencrastus

In A Sparrow's Flight, her second novel, first published in 1989, Margaret Elphinstone is already occupying her characteristic location on the borderlands which were to become familiar territory in her subsequent writing.

The novel is set in the 'debatable lands' between Scotland and England but explores more elusive borders between waking and dreaming, sanity and madness, myth and reality, and the unsettling landscape between our imagined pasts and hoped for futures. Thomas and Naomi are on a journey through a world that has experienced catastrophic change.

Early reviewers, writing amid the Cold War, placed the story in the aftermath of nuclear holocaust. The author offers no such certainty. The plaintive but unexplained references to 'before the world changed' resonate with a menace all the more unnerving in its ambiguity. Through this regenerating landscape - the previously blighted 'empty lands' - Thomas and Naomi find their journey turns full circle, returning them to their starting point as changed people, with new understandings of friendship and belonging. As with every quest there is a grail and their grail is music. Its rediscovery is a metaphor for that Golden Age we all need to believe existed 'before the world changed'.

"........powerfully convincing in its blend of medievalism and post-modern disillusion..." Douglas Gifford

This short story originally appeared in the anthology The Starry Rift: Tales of New Tomorrows (2008), edited by Jonathan Strahan. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection (2009).