Everything he owned fit into a backpack and one doubled bin bag. It had taken him less than ten minutes to pack up four years of his life. It had taken a little longer to fold himself away, to hide all the bits of himself that had slowly been unfurling since he had arrived on the mainland. In truth, he had not changed that much since he had been at college, and as he roamed the ferry he wondered if he had always known he would be forced to come home eventually.
Out of money and with little to show for his art school years on the mainland, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry home, called back by his father to the island of Harris. In the windswept croft in which he grew up, Cal reluctantly resumes his old life, caught between the two poles of his childhood: his father John, a sheep farmer, weaver, and pillar of the local Presbyterian church, and his Glaswegian grandmother Ella who has kept a faltering peace with her son-in-law for decades.
While Cal wonders if any lonely men might be found on the island’s hillsides, back in a tight-knit Hebridean community where talk is both social currency and a tool for control, and where a rigid adherence to Presbyterian faith clashes with the unspoken desires of its inhabitants, John is dismayed by his son’s long hair and seeming unwillingness to be Saved. As the seasons pass, everything is poised to change as the threads holding the community together become increasingly entangled.
Read this exclusive extract now, as chosen by library staff across the UK for the BBC Radio 2 Book Club.
