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The follow-up to the award-winning The Sterkarm Handshake: A woman's return to Scotland's barbaric past ensnares her in a web of intrigue, danger, and love. Andrea Mitchell once found acceptance and love among the Sterkarm clan in lawless 1500s Scotland when she gained access to Great Britain's past via the FUP Corporation's “Time Tube.” Since her return to the present, she has been unable to readjust to twenty-first century life. So when the company's CEO, James Windsor, offers to send her back to the violent, colorful era—and her beloved Per Sterkarm—Andrea eagerly agrees. The past she reenters, however, is not the one she remembers. To avoid potential catastrophic effects on the future, FUP has sent her to a different dimension and an alternate sixteenth century. Here, she is a stranger to her former friends, including her onetime lover Per, who is preparing to marry a daughter of the hated Grannams, the Sterkarms'sworn enemies. But the union is part of FUP's insidious plan to plunder the past of its natural wealth. When the wedding goes brutally, tragically awry, Andrea finds herself caught in the middle, a pawn in a violent endgame devised by Windsor and his greedy cronies. And this time there may not be sanctuary for her among the proud, primitive folk she once admired—or even an escape forward to the future where she truly belongs. Susan Price's The Sterkarm Handshake was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize. In A Sterkarm Kiss, the Carnegie Medal–winning author once again ingeniously blends historical and science fiction in a masterful time-travel adventure as thrilling and unforgettable as its acclaimed predecessor.

A twenty-first-century corporation invades the domain of a warlike sixteenth-century Scottish clan in this “brilliantly imagined” time-travel adventure (Philip Pullman). The miraculous invention of a Time Tube has given Great Britain's mighty FUP corporation unprecedented power, granting it unlimited access to the rich natural resources of the past. Opening a portal into sixteenth-century Scotland, the company has sent representatives back five hundred years to deal with the Sterkarms, a lawless barbarian clan that has plundered both sides of the English-Scottish border for generations. Among the first of the company's representatives to arrive from the future, young anthropologist Andrea Mitchell finds herself strangely drawn to this primitive tribe of raiders and pillagers who, not surprisingly, view her as magical. As translator and liaison, she becomes enmeshed in the personal lives of these proud, savage folk, developing an especially strong emotional bond with Per, the handsome son of the ruthless Sterkarm chieftain, Toorkild. But the Sterkarms'welcome does not extend to the FUP corporate despoilers from the future—and soon a fragile agreement between the untamable Scots and the interloping “Elves” begins to crumble. Suddenly war looms on the horizon, and when treachery on both sides ignites a firestorm of violence, Andrea will have to choose where her loyalties truly lie: with her coldhearted employers or with the barbarous kinfolk of the man she has come to love. A winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize and a finalist for the Carnegie Medal, called “enthralling” by Philip Pullman, the author of the His Dark Materials novels, Susan Price's Sterkarm Handshake is a masterful blend of historical and science fiction critics have called “dazzling,” “exciting,” “memorable,” “thought provoking,” and “a thumping good page-turner.”