With one hand resting low on her belly, Ruby waited where the ocean met the land, to see what might happen. She caught sight of the head of the gray seal as it appeared once more and wondered what was happening in that other world, just beneath the surface.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

FOLKTALES LIVE ALL around us. If you look hard enough, you can find one in the bones of every story, every bit of gossip, every film you watch, every book you read. The seed of this book sprouted when I read a folktale about a selkie, but the story may well have been waiting there in my mind all along, ready for me to water it so that it could grow into the novel you have just read.

The folktale in question is called “The Mermaid Wife,” which is said to be from the isle of Unst, the most northerly island in Shetland, and therefore the British Isles. Unst is at the edge of one of the few places in the world where, in autumn, the sky is fleetingly lit with the mysterious and astonishing Northern Lights. Strange happenings and odd things coming from the sea there are not unusual, and the story goes that one evening, a very long time ago, a local man came across a group of selkie women dancing on the sand. He found their sealskins lying nearby and took one so that when the selkies saw him and fled, slipping into their skins as they ran for the surf, one of them was stranded. In the way of many fairytales, the selkie woman’s beauty worked against her: although the man saw that she was heartbroken, he could not bring himself to free her by giving her back her skin, dressing her instead in human clothes and taking the weeping woman home with him. Having no other choice, the woman lived with him for many years and had several children. According to the story, she eventually seemed content, though it is noted that she often spent hours gazing out to sea. One day, while the man was out at work, the children came across an old sealskin hidden in the barn. They brought it to their mother, who fell upon it with joy, hugged her children one last time, and ran down to the water, where she dressed in her skin and swam away.

This story chimed in a particular way with me. I felt the reason could be found in childhood, in the stories many of us share, in a kind of subconscious, half-remembered collective knowledge that draws people toward such things. Folktales are retold in different versions the world over. As children, the music of story is sung to us so often that sometimes, we don’t even realize that the story we are telling has been told before, time and time again.