It’s 1856, and Isabel Aird is aghast when her husband is appointed doctor to the extraordinary waterworks being built miles from the city at Loch Katrine. But Isabel, denied the motherhood role that is expected of her by a succession of miscarriages, slowly begins to work out what her life in Victorian society is for. Inspired by the mysterious death of the seventeenth-century minister Robert Kirke and set in a pivotal era two centuries later when engineering innovation flourished but women did not, The Ninth Child blends folklore with historical realism in a spellbinding narrative.