Set in the Orkneys on the fictitious island of Norday, a young poet daydreams the history of the island and its people. He travels back in time to Viking adventures at the court of the Byzantine Emperor in Constantinople. Part of the 1995 Scottish Book Fortnight promotion.

Thorfinn, a crofter's son living on the remote island of Norday, is a dreamy boy ; 'idle and useless' according to his teachers. Bored by school, happier wandering the shores of his island home, he escapes into the limitless world of his imagination. Closing his eyes in the 1930s he dreams of crossing the 'fish-fraught' ocean with Viking raiders. Falling asleep to the monotonous tones of a history lesson he finds himself running from the press gang into the arms of a beautiful seal-maiden who longs to return to the sea. War and adventure, the struggles of great men and the everyday toil of the fisherfolk, Thorfinn dreams the sweep of Norday's history, its life and its inevitable death… 'His finest novel yet: we are reading this author at the height of his powers.'
THE TIMES 'The great ocean of time has been more widely sailed and more deeply trawled by George Mackay Brown than by any other writer in Scottish literature. Rich in poetry, emblazoned with marvellous imagery…a millennial reach in which every heron and seal is the embodiment of all its predecessors, every fisherman a descendant of those who harvested the same waters before him.'
GLASGOW HERALD '…mythic stories that affirm the human spirit, clad in a prose of sinuous beauty. George Mackay Brown remains one of our truly inimitable novelists.'
DAILY TELEGRAPH '…richness and colour, wonderful prose and imagery, and through it all you breathe the peat smoke of the croft, the wip of the wind which beats up the spray of the northern seas. A Mackay Brown novel is an event to be savoured, to be read over and over again for its subtleties. It is a joy.'
EDINBURGH EVENING NEWS