Phantom Limb – Shortlisted For The Scottish National Book Award

Our summary description

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

One evening, Gillis, a young Scottish minister with a faltering faith, quite literally stumbles into the past. In the churned soil of an uprooted elm tree he finds a severed hand, ancient and animate, beckoning with unsettling intent. What should be buried is instead brought home, given pen and paper, and allowed to speak in jagged sketches and furious lines.

In Phantom Limb, the discovery opens a conduit between centuries. The hand carries echoes of the Scottish Reformation, of iconoclasm and bloodshed, of art shaped by belief and violence alike. Gillis, however, hears something else. Where history murmurs, he senses possibility. Declaring the hand miraculous, he begins to fashion himself into a prophet, driven by vanity, longing, and the desire to matter.

The novel balances dark humour with unease, rooted in Scotland’s religious inheritance and its uneasy relationship with authority. As Gillis’s ambitions swell, belief becomes performance, and conviction slips into manipulation. Phantom Limb asks what happens when faith is used as material, and whether a nation, or a man, can be remade without reckoning with what has already been severed.