News of the Dead: Winner of the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction

Our summary description

As Independent Scottish booksellers, we write all of our descriptions personally, we hope you enjoy this one.

Deep in the mountains of north east Scotland lies Glen Conach, a place with few records and many silences. Its story is hard to gather, shaped as much by what has been forgotten as by what endures. Over centuries, fact has thinned into legend, and memory has learned to speak in echoes.

Three lives unfold here, separated by time but bound to the same ground. In ancient Pictland, the hermit Conach lives in contemplation, his faith and solitude later transformed into story in the Book of Conach. In the early nineteenth century, the antiquarian Charles Kirkliston Gibb arrives with ambition and curiosity, drawn into the rhythms and fragilities of the glen’s small community. In the present, a child speaks of a ghost, and Maja, looking back over her long life, knows that some presences never leave.

This is literary fiction attentive to refuge and intrusion, to how places receive strangers and how stories are shaped, altered and passed on, or quietly lost.