Life is not easy for the women of Glasdrum. A skeleton is unearthed, too many walkers are falling to their deaths off mountain cliffs, and the local pub doesn't know how to make a decent daiquiri. As the women battle through daily life, the spectre of death looms over the Highland town. Could one of them be living with a killer?

Love, death, culture clash, escape... set in North Africa, Daughter Disappeared is a story of family survival for anyone who loves a hard-hitting 'women in jeopardy' thriller.

Dr Gaskell's pioneering study of social and economic change in a west Highland parish during the last century has come to be regarded as a classic of local history, a book which raises issues that are still of general and indeed of national importance. But Morvern Transformed is more than a study of history: it is (to quote Professor R. H. Campbell's new Introduction) 'a fascinating portrayal of a way of life which, only a century old, is already as different from the present as it was in its own day from the way of life another century before.'

With this magnificently assured new novel, John McGahern reminds us why he has been called the Irish Chekhov, as he guides readers into a village in rural Ireland and deftly, compassionately traces its natural rhythms and the inner lives of its people. Here are the Ruttledges, who have forsaken the glitter of London to raise sheep and cattle, gentle Jamesie Murphy, whose appetite for gossip both charms and intimidates his neighbors, handsome John Quinn, perennially on the look-out for a new wife, and the town’s richest man, a gruff, self-made magnate known as “the Shah.” Following his characters through the course of a year, through lambing and haying seasons, market days and family visits, McGahern lays bare their passions and regrets, their uneasy relationship with the modern world, their ancient intimacy with death.

Now a major motion picture: the Booker-shortlisted author's last novel: a 'masterpiece' ( Observer) by 'one of the greatest writers of our era' (Hilary Mantel) Joe and Kate Ruttledge have come to Ireland from London in search of a different life. In passages of beauty and truth, the drama of a year in their lives and those of the memorable characters that move about them unfolds through the action, the rituals of work, religious observances and play. We are introduced, with deceptive simplicity, to a complete representation of existence - an enclosed world has been transformed into an Everywhere. 'McGahern brings us that tonic gift of the best fiction, the sense of truth - the sense of transparency that permits us to see imaginary lives more clearly than we see our own.' John Updike