Ian Rankin: The Flood (UK 2008)

From the Publisher:
Mary Miller has always been an outcast. As a child, she fell into the hot burn - a torrent of warm chemical run-off from the local coal mine - and her hair turned white. Initially she was treated with sympathy, but all that changed a few days later, when the young man who pushed her in died in an accident.

Now, many years later, Mary is a single mother caught up in a faltering affair. Her son, Sandy, has fallen in love with a strange homeless girl - and both mother and son are forced to come to terms with a dark secret from Mary's past.

Ian Rankin: The Flood. With a brand-new introduction from the author. Orion, ISBN: 0752883690 (August, 2008), 251 p., £7.99.

Ian Rankin: The Flood (UK 2005)

From the Publisher:
In 1986, a small Scottish publishing firm released a first novel by a talented young writer. Only a few hundred copies were printed but it was a literary milestone nonetheless. The book was THE FLOOD. The author was Ian Rankin...

Mary Miller had always been an outcast. As a young girl she had fallen into the hot burn - a torrent of warm chemical run-off from the local coal mine. Fished out white-haired and half-dead, sympathy for her quickly faded when the young man who pushed her in died in a mining accident just two days later. From then on she was regarded with a mixture of suspicion and fascination by her God-fearing community.

Now, years later she is hardly less alone. She is the mother of a bastard son, Sandy, and caught up in a faltering affair with a local teacher. Sandy, meanwhile, has fallen in love with a strange homeless girl. The search for happiness isn't easy. Both mother and son must face a dark secret from their past, in the growing knowledge that their small dramas are being played out against a much larger canvas, glimpsed only in symbols and flickering images - of decay and regrowth, of fire and water - of the flood.

The Flood is both a coming-of-age novel and an amazing portrait of a time and place. Proto-Rankin as it is, it's dark, atmospheric and powerful - a remarkable debut from a remarkable author.

Ian Rankin: The Flood. With a brand-new introduction from the author. Orion, ISBN: 0752873091 (September, 2005), 205 p., Hardback £14.99, Paperback £9.99 (?).

Ian Rankin: The Flood (UK 1986)

From the Publisher:
The action of The Flood, a first novel by lan Rankin, takes place over a period of twenty years in the life and slow death of a Fife mining community. At the heart of the novel are Mary Miller, an outcast, believed by some to have occult powers, and her bastard son, Sandy. Mary finds herself caught up in a faltering affair with a local schoolteacher, while Sandy falls in love with a strange gypsy girl. As the action moves towards a tense and unexpected climax, both mother and son are forced to come to terms with the past, in the growing knowledge that their small dramas are being played out against a much larger drama, a drama glimpsed only in symbols and flickering images - images of decay and regrowth, of fire and water, of the flood.

Ian Rankin was born in Fife. He graduated from Edinburgh University in 1983, where he is currently a postgraduate student. He has contributed stories to Cencrastus, Edinburgh Review, The Scotsman and New Writing Scotland.

Ian Rankin: The Flood. Polygon New Fiction, ISBN: 094827509X (January, 1986), 188 p., Hardcover £9.95, £4.95.