Music in the Dark – A beautifully written historical novel about the highland clearances (Paperback)

Our summary description

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Jamesina Ross has learned how to live without expectation. She keeps to herself in her tenement flat, her past folded away, her trust spent. When a stranger knocks seeking lodgings, she takes him in on her own terms. He does not recognise her. She recognises him instantly, and chooses silence.

In Music in the Dark, Jamesina’s story reaches back to a Highland childhood shaped by land, kinship, and song. Her music once held a record of place and belonging, until violence tore through her community during the Highland Clearances. The damage of that day has never healed, marked on her body and carried in memory she refuses to revisit.

The arrival of her lodger unsettles the careful distance she has built. His belief that the past might still offer a future feels both dangerous and absurd. Set against Scotland’s long shadow of loss and dispossession, the novel moves gently through grief, creativity, and survival, asking whether healing requires remembering, or whether endurance alone can ever be enough.