Published by Cannongate
A haunting and compelling historical novel, The Sea Road is an ambitious re-telling of the Viking exploration of the North Atlantic from the viewpoint of one extraordinary woman.
Taking the accidental discovery of North America as its focal point, what emerges is a multi-layered voyage into the unknown – the personal, geographical and the spiritual – all recounted with wonderfully rich, atmospheric detail.
Elphinstone’s feel for character, period and landscape is as spellbinding as her ability to describe issues of universal interest and in The Sea Road she has produced a historical novel of outstanding quality.
Magnus Magnusson
Gudrid of Iceland was the farthest travelled woman in the world during the Viking Age, from Iceland and Norway to Greenland and North America and then to Rome. She gave birth to the first European child born in North America and for a thousand years she has deserved a saga in her own right.
Margaret Elphinstone has made good the omission at last – and how well she has done it!
Ron Kirke, Times Literary Supplement, 22/12/00
The Sea Road describes with great vividness the routines, the discomforts and the occasional glories of life on a longship, ashore in Iceland and its dependencies, Greenland and Vinland. There is a pleasant scene when the monk delights Gudrid – who is illiterate, of course – by showing her an illuminated bible.
Alex O’Connell, The Times 4/10/00
Forget Richard Branson, the audacious female traveller Gudrid of Iceland is the original explorer’s explorer – Elphinstone has written a fine tribute to a woman whose tale is as warm and inviting as a hot spring on a clear winter day.
Simon Hall, The Herald 21/10/00
One of the many beauties of this novel is the way in which Elphinstone puts flesh on old saga bones. While much of the dialogue is fittingly laconic, there are delightful passages of lyrical prose which describe isolated pockets of beauty among the frozen desolation of Greenland … Every other page, it seems, is gilded with erudite detail, bringing the saga templates to life … As well as capitalising on the narrative verve of the sagas, Elphinstone has intellectualised her source material deeply … The result is a novel which is wonderfully rich in ideas of real philosophical depth.
My feeling is that our writers of late have over-indulged in gritty, modern, urban Scotland. It’s a refreshing delight to read a novel of such extremely high calibre which interweaves mythical, magical, and historical dimensions in ways which are reminiscent of the Scottish Renaissance literature of the twenties and thirties. Elphinstone is a worthy successor to writes like Linklater and Mackay Brown, developing their themes in the new century with a voice which is distinctively her own. Never before has the Norse past been put to such evocative and compelling use in our literature.
 | Margaret ElphinstoneMargaret Elphinstone’s fiction, most of it historical, is characterised by people encountering frontiers – where cultures and ideas are meeting and their worlds are turned upside down. Voyageurs is set in the turmoil of the North American war of 1812; Light brings the rational modern world into conflict with an older, mystical tradition and The Gathering Night, set in the Mesolithic era, addresses ambiguous delineations of mystery and reality in the aftermath of natural disaster. The heroine of the Viking novel Sea Road undertakes a voyage into the unknown – personal, geographical and spiritual – establishing herself in a male world, encountering new lands and the challenge of religious upheaval. |
