The lives of three generations of women intertwine in the Scottish stone cottage of Agatha, a spinster aunt with more than a helping of spunk. For Agatha's niece Margaret, born in the States but with her own secret connection to the cottage, packing her resentful daughter Hope off to Scotland the summer after her parents have split seems like the cleanest solution to the kind of messy emotions Margaret hates. Margaret spends her summer finding out who she is other than a wife and mother — and she likes it. Hope has to reinvent herself and her vision of her dad, tricky seas to navigate even without trying to figure out how to eat a bannock and remember which way to look when skateboarding across the road. And gentle Aunt Agatha wonders what would have happened if she'd made room in her life for romance and adventure, instead of just for family. Told from the perspective of each woman, The Thorn Tree weaves together the complexities of love and life for each generation, and shows the strength of family ties.

A beautifully wrought novel on the aftershocks of the heady but dangerous late 1960s and the relationship between trauma and the creative impulse. Now in his late-sixties, Daniel lives in quiet anonymity in a converted guest cottage in the Hollywood Hills. A legendary artist, he’s known for one seminal work—Thorn Tree—a hulking, welded, scrap metal sculpture that he built in the Mojave desert in the 1970s. The work emerged from tragedy, but building it kept Daniel alive and catapulted him to brief, reluctant fame in the art world. Daniel is neighbors with Celia, a charismatic but fragile actress. She too experienced youthful fame, hers in a popular television series, but saw her life nearly collapse after a series of bad decisions. Now, a new movie with a notorious director might reignite her career. A single mother, Celia leaves her young son Dean for weeks at a time with her father, Jack, who stays at her house while she’s on location. Jack and Daniel strike up a tentative friendship as Dean takes to visiting Daniel’s cottage--but something about Jack seems off. Discomfiting, strangely intimate, with flashes of anger balanced by an almost philosophical bent, Jack is not the harmless grandparent he pretends to be. Weaving the idealism and the darkness of the late 1960s, the glossy surfaces of Los Angeles celebrity today, and thrumming with the sound of the Grateful Dead, the mania of Charles Manson and other cults, and the secrets that both Jack and Daniel have harbored for fifty years, Thorn Tree by Max Ludington is an utterly-compelling novel.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Song in the Green Thorn Tree" by James William Barke. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.