Kidnapped - Catriona - The Master of Ballantrae - Weir of Hermiston
These four great novels take us deep into Robert Louis Stevenson's
imaginative and bitter-sweet relationship with his native country.
Kidnapped, and its sequel Catriona, are renowned the world over as
supreme stories of adventure and romance. On another level they also
explore the subtle divisions of Scottish history and character in the
eighteenth century, and (some would say) the present day.
The Master of Ballantrae takes a darker and more disturbing turn, with
its tale of rival brothers caught in a webof hatred, obsession, love and
betrayal which draws them to their end in the frozen wastes of North
America.
Stevenson's fascination with the divided nature of the human self (most
obviously demonstrated in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) appears again in the
Weir of Hermiston with its terrible confrontation between a father and
his son.
With an unsurpassed combination of physical adventure and psychological
insight, The Scottish Novels have moved and thrilled readers and
writers from Stevenson's contemporaries to the present day.