The Canty Stane

The latest book from the Amazon chart-topping author, Gary Mill, is a magical concoction of Scottish historical fiction, time travel, urban thriller and irreverent black comedy. It plots the fantastical journey of a famed young eighteenth-century Edinburgh poet called Robert Fergusson who - in the August of 1773 - elects to time travel hundreds of years into the future using a charmed stone. Bored with the drudgery of his mind-numbing work as a copyist in the Edinburgh courts, the young bard visits a spae-wife (fortune teller) who predicts that a magic stone will take him on, "a lang jurney: nae mair than an inch but forder than the starnies aboon." It's not long before Fergusson discovers the stane and, within the blink of a weary eye, he awakes in Edinburgh in the summer of 2023. Soon he finds himself in cahoots with a bonny, flame-haired lassie called Stella Ferly. Unfortunately for the now-perpetually-bewildered young poet, Stella happens to be on the run from a lethal gangster called Jimmy Bawbags who's a trifle irate at the larcenous redhead for "appropriating" a suitcase of his Class A drugs. As the lives of both Fergusson and Stella become more endangered by the hour, the young bard quickly discovers that his most potent weapon of defence is the marvellous body of vernacular poetry he recently authored in eighteenth-century Auld Reekie (Edinburgh). Now trapped in the twenty-first century there are pressing questions for Maister Fergusson to answer: Will he and Stella survive their inevitable encounter with Mr Bawbags? And if the young poet's heart manages to defy the odds and continue to beat, will he ever make it back home to his friends and family in 1773? Only time, and the Canty Stane, can reveal Robert Fergusson's ultimate destiny.

NOTE: Partly written in eighteenth-century Scots, 'The Canty Stane' incorporates the beauty, vibrancy, humour, insight and sheer life-affirming joy of Fergusson's wonderful Scottish poetry. And it's this poetry which heavily influenced a certain Robert Burns, a younger contemporary of Fergusson, whose inspired Scottish verse soon took the literary world by storm and eventually reached a global audience. So sit down, keep the attached glossary to hand, and plunge into the sublime literary landscape of young Robert Fergusson as he battles curmudgeonly gangsters, falls in love, defies the laws of physics and struggles to identify, and then accept, the immutable direction of his own fate.

He wasna born o' auld banes, but there's nae doot the pawky chiel makkit his shaw.