Karen Campbell writes the sort of compassion that doesn’t get applause. Not the soft-focus version that arrives with a swell of music and a lesson about “resilience.” Her compassion comes battered, half-choked, forced to squeeze through the gaps that poverty, shame, bureaucracy, violence, and plain bad luck leave behind. If you want your fiction to reassure you that kindness is natural and plentiful, Campbell will irritate you. She keeps showing how thin the air gets, and how hard people have to work just to stay decent.
Her early crime novels make that clear straight away. The Anna Cameron books—The Twilight Time, After the Fire, Shadowplay, Proof of Life—don’t treat policing as a moral cleansing service. They treat it as messy proximity to harm, the daily grind of seeing what people do to each other and still having to go home and pretend you’re a normal citizen. Campbell knows the procedural world from the inside, and she won’t sell it as heroism. She’s interested in the human compromise: what the job makes you ignore, what it trains you to call “manageable,” what it asks you to swallow so you can keep functioning.
Campbell doesn’t write compassion as a personality trait. She writes it as labour—something you do while the world keeps trying to make you mean.
When she steps away from crime into the so-called “literary” novels, the same argument sharpens. This Is Where I Am is Glasgow without the tourist varnish: a city where grief and displacement collide, where the official language of support can turn human need into paperwork. Campbell refuses the lazy reader’s fantasy that empathy is just a matter of feeling the right thing. She’s ruthless about how empathy gets rationed. Who receives it. Who has to perform for it. Who gets treated as a problem to be managed rather than a life to be met.
Rise takes the romance out of escape. It’s about a woman running from coercive control and violence, and Campbell doesn’t turn that into a glossy empowerment arc. She writes the aftermath: the nervous system that won’t stop flinching, the way fear follows you into the countryside, the way “freedom” still comes with bills and judgement and memory. The landscape isn’t there to heal her. The landscape just stands there while she tries not to collapse.
Then Paper Cup turns its attention to homelessness with a refusal I respect: she won’t let the reader treat the homeless character as a symbol, a moral test, or a heartwarming device. She drags you through the small humiliations that polite society prefers not to notice—the way people avert their eyes, the way kindness arrives late and often costs something, the way a life can be knocked off course and then punished for falling. Compassion in this book isn’t a glowing force; it’s a rare, risky interruption.
The Sound of the Hours moves away from Scotland into wartime Italy, and you can see why: Campbell isn’t loyal to setting as branding. She’s loyal to pressure. War, politics, belonging, prejudice—another environment where compassion is endangered and easily corrupted. She doesn’t write “good people in bad times” as a comfort story. She writes the compromises people make and the price that gets paid later, in private, when the slogans stop working.
And then This Bright Life comes along and does the most difficult thing of all: it puts childhood under a harsh light without milking it. A 12-year-old boy, a split-second mistake, adults with files and procedures and good intentions that still bruise. Campbell writes the “helping” professions as they are in real life: necessary, flawed, sometimes frightening. Care is not a warm bath. Care is a system, and systems grind. If you’ve ever been on the wrong side of one—poor, young, grieving, unwanted—you’ll recognise the tone: compassion present, but fighting for oxygen.
Her characters don’t get saved by kindness; they get scraped forward by it, and even that comes with conditions, judgement, and debt.
That’s Campbell’s real subject: the social cost of being human in a place that monetises everything and moralises the rest. She doesn’t let you aestheticise harm. She doesn’t let you call suffering “poignant” and move on. She keeps it ordinary, which is why it lands. Ordinary harm is the kind that thrives. Ordinary harm is the kind that institutions can ignore while telling themselves they’re “trying.”
If you want comfort, look elsewhere. If you want fiction that treats compassion as something fragile, fought-for, and still worth defending even when it’s exhausted, read Karen Campbell—and don’t you dare confuse that defence with softness.
