Best-loved Celtic fairy tales - Neil Philip

A collection of stories from Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man, Cornwall and Brittany which show their common Celtic heritage in their love of extravagance and poetry, their quick wit and their daring sense of adventure.

Here, retold much as they were around Celtic peat fires a hundred years ago, are the enthralling tales of Fair Brown and Trembling, The Brown Bear of the Glen, and The Ship that Went to America.

Some of the stories give familiar tales a Celtic twist - Duffy and the Devil is a comic Cornish take on the Rumplestiltskin story; The Black Cat is a dark and mysterious Breton Cinderella...and others seem new and strange such as the doomed love of Lutey and the Mermaid or the mystic rapture of The Little Bird.

Perhaps the most riveting of all is the Irish tale of The Soul Cages, in which a fisherman makes friends with one of the sea-people, Coomara, and uses their friendship to free the souls of drowned sailors, kept by Coomara in lobster pots in his house beneath the waves...