What's Mine's Mine — Volume 2
1824
In the wind-scoured Scottish Highlands of the 18th and 19th centuries, a way of life is dying. George MacDonald’s 1886 novel portrays the devastating Clearances through the intersecting fates of two families: the English Palmers, whose ruthless Mr. Palmer has torn Clan Ruadh from their ancestral lands, and the clan chief Alister Macruadh, whose people face starvation and dispersal. Within this landscape of loss moves Ian Macruadh, son, brother, and a man caught between his mother’s fierce Calvinism and his own hunger for something like grace. A parallel narrative threads through the volume: the harrowing story of a mother who, widowed and left with nothing, watches her children succumb to illness while her faith holds like a candle against the dark. MacDonald’s God speaks in mountain mist and loch water, in the patient faces of those who remain. This is a novel about what we owe each other when everything is being taken away, and what, if anything, waits beyond the last loss.
