Midwinter

A recovered literary puzzle from the world of Samuel Johnson and James Boswell opens into a tale of hidden loyalties, dangerous roads, and the uneasy meeting of Scotland and England. What first seems like a fragmentary curiosity soon becomes a vivid historical novel in which memory, politics, and identity are constantly under pressure. Boswell's observations of Johnson's silences about the Jacobite rising give way to the story of a Highland gentleman traveling under an assumed name, a man whose honor repeatedly collides with prudence. Lost in a bleak English forest, he is drawn into violence, rescued by a poacher boy, and guided to a secretive community of moor-men on a Roman causeway. There he encounters Amos Midwinter, a scarred fiddler whose music exposes his disguise and binds him to a hidden network of local allies. Together they cross moors and hills toward Brightwell, sheltering with farmers, evading scrutiny, and witnessing armed men on the roads as winter closes in. Their journey leads to the snowbound Sleeping Deer, where Lady Norreys arrives with elegance and mystery, and the inn's uneasy hospitality suggests that politics, class, and private intentions are about to collide. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.