Family heritage and emigration come to the fore in a timeless novel of Scottish people at home and abroad. THE SEA STONE SISTERS is a lengthy saga with several changes of scenery, just right to enjoy over a few days.

A legend tells that the Four Sisters of Skara, a village in Scotland, were kidnapped by sea raiders. Four standing stones remember them. But in 1931, Charles Blackmore invited a curse by having the stones laid flat when he proudly built a new house. Slight paranormal touches run through the tale, with harm coming to the Blackmores and others of Skara.

Charles was a self-made man, but that didn’t last. His four daughters, starting with Iris, the eldest girl, emigrated. We follow Iris as she boards a ship for Ceylon, hoping to find a relative. She writes tenderly to Daisy, Lily and Rose, but intends to return. The posh company and the dissolute tea-planters are a total change from her life experience to date. All she brought was a bag of clothes and a ring.

Roz Chatton travels to Britain after a tragedy in her family in Australia. While waitressing in London, one day she sees a painting of four old standing stones in an antique shop window. Something about it intrigues her, and she speaks to the proprietor, an elderly man called Hugo Ballantyne. She doesn’t know if she has Scots ancestry, but she wears her mother’s heirloom opal ring, which seems to resonate with the painting. Hugo helps her find a firm of solicitors who are dealing with the Blackmore estate – what’s left of it, which is an abandoned house.

Through Iris’s story, moving from Ceylon to Australia, we view the 1930s, a time of recession and bad fortune all around. Plane travel was quite new, and drought killed off many hopes and dreams. Roz gives us the post- COVID travel era, in which danger comes through people and technology. The contrasts are vivid, and some of the tragedies can be upsetting. The reader just keeps hoping the sisters will find love and happiness. I feel that we get too many first- person points of view, as one of the lawyers shows us around for a time, and while he may feature in another story of this nascent series, it seems to stretch the first book.    

Eleanor Buchanan tells us she drew on her personal family history and letters to write this book. THE SEA STONE SISTERS is an enchanting timeslip tale, which suggests that the four rings worn by the Blackmore girls may be reunited by the end of the series.