Emotionally Weird

Our summary description

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

On a peat and heather island off Scotland’s west coast, Effie and her mother Nora shelter in the decaying house their family once claimed as home. Cut off from the mainland, they pass the days telling stories, circling around truths neither is quite ready to face.

Nora’s tales avoid the questions Effie most wants answered, including the identity of her father, who shifts uneasily between names. Effie counters with accounts of her life in Dundee, of college and of Bob, her listless partner, absorbed in imagined worlds while the real one drifts past.

As days lengthen and the island closes in, unease creeps through the stories they tell. Effie senses she is being watched. People around her seem compelled to write, to record, to explain. Old certainties begin to thin, and rumours surface that refuse to be dismissed.

This is literary fiction with a gothic edge, attentive to voice, inheritance and the unstable ground between truth and invention, set in a place where questions linger longer than answers.