I first met this book at school, read it, enjoyed and read the two sequels. Recently I came back to it and as a result read the reviews on amazon.com. They struck me as unfair. This book is not a book about the rising in 1745. It is about five meetings between two men on different sides of the conflict, Keith Wyndham an English officer and Ewen Cameron of Ardroy.

I am still surprised by the negativity of some reviews so I read the book again this week to see if age had changed my opinion. Is it because I've visited many of the places described in the text that they come to life when I read it? Perhaps. But still I'd recommend the book to anyone who wants to know something of Scottish history. If you are expecting another Outlander, you will not find it here and in my opinion at least, that is no bad thing. ( )

Set in Scotland in the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, this is the story of an unlikely friendship between Keith Windham, a career soldier in the British Army, and a young Highland chieftain who follows Bonnie Prince Charlie in his bid for the throne.

Ewen Cameron's foster-father, who has the two sights, predicts their meeting five times, through an encounter with a heron, and these meetings do indeed come about. Though each is unswervingly loyal to his own allegiance, in the course of the rebellion they continue to meet, and their friendship develops and deepens in adversity.

The story can be read as straight romance, gay romance, or a superbly researched historical adventure. The author was a secretary at an Oxford College, and had previously been a nurse in France during the First World War, and one can assume that she knew exactly what she was writing about in all respects. And she did the job brilliantly; the book's funny and moving by turns, and though the ending is sad, it's also absolutely epic and stays in the mind for a long, long time.

The 1968 TV series has recently gone up at Youtube and it conveys the tone of the book very well. Though it was obviously made on a shoestring budget it was filmed on the book locations (unlike, say the 2006 BBC version of 'Kidnapped', which was filmed in New Zealand and shows it.)

Highly recommended, both the book and the series; keep the tissues handy, though. ( )