What an antithetical mind! – tenderness, roughness delicacy, coarseness sentiment, sensuality soaring and grovelling dirt and deity all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!
Lord Byron, 1813, on reading some ‘unpublished and never-to-be published’ letters of Robert Burns.

Amongst the dirt and smoke of 18th century Edinburgh, the great poet ponders his next move. Frustrated with the Edinburgh literati and the tight purse of his publisher, Burns finds distraction in the capital’s dark underbelly. Midnight assignations with working girls and bawdy rhymes for his tavern friends are interrupted when he is unexpectedly called to a mysterious meeting with a dangerous man. But then Burns falls in love, perhaps the only real love in a lifetime of casual romances, with beautiful Nancy, the inspiration for ‘Ae Fond Kiss’.

Donald Smith has woven the real life love affair of Nancy and Burns into a tantalising tale of passion and betrayal, binding historical fact and fiction together to create an intimate portrait of Burns the man.



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