Year of the Sheep

Scotland 1805

The landlord has decreed that the people of the straths and glens must leave their homes to make way for the coming of the blackface sheep and their herders.

The people of the glens, who have lived peacefully there for almost a thousand years, do not want to go.

That was the central conflict of the Highland Clearances, a sad period in Scottish history. James Y. Bartlett's sweeping historical novel about the Clearances in Sutherland in Scotland's Far North, focuses in on one important—and historically accurate—fact:

Both the landlord and the people being told to leave were women.

Elizabeth Gordon was the 19th chief of Clan Sutherland, and was married to the wealthiest man in all of Great Britain.  The clansmen she told to leave their homes in Glencullen were mostly women, as all the men in the village had been sent off to Europe to fight against Bonaparte.

But those women, inspired by the village shaman and healer, a white witch called Mute Meg; organized by the schoolteacher Anna Kenton; and led by the almost shape-shifting outlaw known as Billy Hanks, decided to make their stand.

Year of the Sheep tells the story of this painful conflict, from the beginning at the Battle of Culloden Moor, through the chaotic events of the French Revolution and into the peaceful glens of Scotland, where the fires unleashed by the changing times threaten to end a way of life that endured over many centuries.

In the hands of noted storyteller and novelist James Y. Bartlett (author of the popular Hacker Golf Mystery series), this story of the Highland Clearances comes alive.  There are no happy endings in any tale of the Clearances, but Year of the Sheep will entertain, inspire and evoke memories of a way of life that has gone forever.