James Barke

Here is the story of Burns, rich in human drama, redolent not of academic cloisters but of the cottage hearth, the country tavern, the breezy upland farms and the windswept moors of Ayrshire. This is the first volume of a great and significant work of fiction covers twenty-five years of Burns' life, that is the boyhood and early manhood amid the grinding poverty of his father's home.

The Song in the Green Thorn Tree follows Robert Burns progress from Ayrshire to the bright lights of Edinburgh and charts the start of his meteoric rise from ploughman to poet. From obscurity to fame and a future which promises to be very different from the poverty of rural Ayrshire.