Corrag

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However, her warnings to the clan fell on deaf ears and she awoke on the morning of the 13th February 1692 to discover the devastation that had been wrought by the government soldiers: houses burnt to the ground, families fled to the hills, and MacIain himself – the Chief of the MacDonalds - murdered as he rose from his bed. In Glencoe we had Corrag, who is said to have lived a solitary life in the mountains and been of “outstanding badness”. Fletcher is a gifted storyteller - the characters and seventeenth century Scotland spring to life in this wonderful tale.

It is easy to ignore it, for sometimes it says what we'd rather it did not - and it is so hard to risk the things we have. This was, for the most part, a well-written and enjoyable piece of historical fiction, but it was overlong in parts and repetitive in others and contained an unnecessary love story that would have been better left on the cutting-room floor. During the course of listening to the “witch”, he was transformed from a disgusted bigot to a compassionate sympathizer.Terrified, in a cold, filthy cell, she awaits her fate of death by burning - until she is visited by Charles Leslie, a young Irishman, hungry to question her. Her prose is extraordinarily lyrical: haunted, dreamlike and precise, reminiscent at times of Sylvia Plath…Fletcher's words are undeniably beautiful and her themes are profound…a haunting novel. The story is passionately and beautifully told by Corrag (who has been branded a witch and imprissioned ) to the visiting Irish Political Activist Charles Leslie who is secretely gathering evidence against King William of Orange.

Corrag lays her heart out on the table as she slowly and purposely tells him everything about her lonesome life. Despite her life so far and her hardships, she has such a capacity for love and kindness for eveyone she meets. At the outset of the book, Charles Leslie comes to gather information about the massacre, and he meets with Corrag, hoping for her death as a witch and the destruction of her body and soul.

Despised and condemned all of her life for her adoration and understanding of the natural world and all of its beauty, Corrag doesn’t understand how she can be so mistreated. But maybe the best thing I learnt was this: that we cannot know a person's soul and nature until we've sat beside them, and talked. The story is alternately narrated by Corrag in her prison cell and by Charles Leslie, in the form of letters home to his wife in Ireland. Corrag has found companionship in her final days and Leslie learns to see whe world through fresh eyes. When I first started this book, i was worried as so many of my GR friends had raved about it, and I didn’t connect with it right away.