<p><b>Longlisted for the Highland Book Prize 2020 </b><br><br><b>‘I’ve long admired Robin Robertson’s narrative gift . . . If you love stories, you will love this book.’ Val McDermid</b><br><br><b>The new book from the author of <i>The Long Take</i>, shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of both the Walter Scott Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize.</b><br><br>Like some lost chapters from the Celtic folk tradition, <i>Grimoire </i>tells stories of ordinary people caught up, suddenly, in the extraordinary: tales of violence, madness and retribution, of second sight, witches, ghosts, selkies, changelings and doubles, all bound within a larger mythology, narrated by a doomed shape-changer – a man, beast or god.<br><br>A grimoire is a manual for invoking spirits. Here, Robin Robertson and his brother Tim Robertson – whose accompanying images are as unforgettable as cave-paintings – raise strange new forms which speak not only of the potency of our myths and superstitions, but how they were used to balance and explain the world and its predicaments.<br><br>From one of our most powerful lyric poets, this is a book of curses and visions, gifts both desired and unwelcome, characters on the cusp of their transformation – whether women seeking revenge or saving their broken children, or men trying to save themselves. Haunting and elemental, <i>Grimoire </i>is full of the same charged beauty as the Scottish landscape – a beauty that can switch, with a mere change in the weather, to hostility and terror.</p>