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When a grisly murder occurs on a Scottish island, Edinburgh detective Fin Macleod must confront his past if he is ever going to discover if the killing has a connection to another one that took place on the mainland.Tags
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How is it that some writers are so skilled they can create a claustrophobic, dreary, and depressing bouillabaisse without saying "claustrophobic, dreary, and depressing"? Such a writer is Peter May in his The Black House, a double entendre title if ever there was one.
From its dark beginning to its hopeful end, this novel holds the reader in its black grip.
A murder mystery, but much more than that, May's atmospheric novel, set on the Scottish Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, is populated with complex, very human characters, who have the sins of past generations visited upon them, in the best tradition of all things Calvinistic.
May's novel kept this reader on the edge of her seat throughout.
From its dark beginning to its hopeful end, this novel holds the reader in its black grip.
A murder mystery, but much more than that, May's atmospheric novel, set on the Scottish Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, is populated with complex, very human characters, who have the sins of past generations visited upon them, in the best tradition of all things Calvinistic.
May's novel kept this reader on the edge of her seat throughout.
Inspector Fin Macleod's life is falling apart due to the death of his eight year old son in a hit-and-run accident. Without their son it seems he and his wife have nothing left in common. He is suddenly assigned to a case on the Isle of Lewis, his birthplace, because the murder resembles one he worked in Edinburgh. The book proceeds with chapters told in first person as memories of his childhood and teen years alternating with a third person account of his investigation. Mysteries about his past tease the reader. How did Fin's parents die? What happened to cripple one of his childhood friends? Why does his neighbor and former best friend seem to resent him--and does any of his past have a bearing on the death of 'Angel' Macritchie, the show more island bully who had made life miserable for many boys of his generation? show less
First Line: They are just kids.
Just one month ago, Detective Fin Macleod and his wife lost their only child in a hit-and-run. It has ruined their marriage. Forcing himself to return to work in Edinburgh, Fin finds himself assigned to a murder investigation on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland-- the place where he was born and lived until he went away to university. It will be his first time back in twenty years.
Arriving in Stornoway he finds that he's unwanted by a Detective Chief Inspector who's looking for the tiniest excuse to get him off the island. Although Fin intuitively knows that there's no real connection between the Lewis murder and the one he was investigating in Edinburgh, he realizes that he can be of show more real use because he went to school with the dead man and knows many of the names on the suspect list. What he doesn't know is how deeply into his own past his investigation will take him.
The first thing that struck me as I read this book was that the setting should be included in the cast of characters. When Fin Macleod speaks of his childhood on the Isle of Lewis being filled with rainbows, I remembered my first trip to the Isle of Skye when I was bedazzled and enchanted by an endless procession of waterfalls and rainbows. On another trip, I stood on a windswept cliff and looked out across The Minch to the Isle of Lewis and felt its siren song. The author brought this all back to me (and so much more), and I can see many other readers falling under the same spell.
There are two magnets in this book: its setting, and Fin Macleod. The unfolding of his character throughout the book by alternating the present day investigation with childhood flashbacks is brilliant. We see a happy little boy whose life is filled with rainbows change into a teenager who can't wait to leave the island forever, and finally into a quiet man who seems filled with regrets... and secrets. Macleod's return to Lewis turns out to be good both for the island and for himself.
I'm still a bit under the spell of this book, so I am very glad to know that there are two forthcoming volumes that will continue the story. I can't help but wonder if rainbows will make a reappearance in Fin's skies. show less
Just one month ago, Detective Fin Macleod and his wife lost their only child in a hit-and-run. It has ruined their marriage. Forcing himself to return to work in Edinburgh, Fin finds himself assigned to a murder investigation on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland-- the place where he was born and lived until he went away to university. It will be his first time back in twenty years.
Arriving in Stornoway he finds that he's unwanted by a Detective Chief Inspector who's looking for the tiniest excuse to get him off the island. Although Fin intuitively knows that there's no real connection between the Lewis murder and the one he was investigating in Edinburgh, he realizes that he can be of show more real use because he went to school with the dead man and knows many of the names on the suspect list. What he doesn't know is how deeply into his own past his investigation will take him.
The first thing that struck me as I read this book was that the setting should be included in the cast of characters. When Fin Macleod speaks of his childhood on the Isle of Lewis being filled with rainbows, I remembered my first trip to the Isle of Skye when I was bedazzled and enchanted by an endless procession of waterfalls and rainbows. On another trip, I stood on a windswept cliff and looked out across The Minch to the Isle of Lewis and felt its siren song. The author brought this all back to me (and so much more), and I can see many other readers falling under the same spell.
There are two magnets in this book: its setting, and Fin Macleod. The unfolding of his character throughout the book by alternating the present day investigation with childhood flashbacks is brilliant. We see a happy little boy whose life is filled with rainbows change into a teenager who can't wait to leave the island forever, and finally into a quiet man who seems filled with regrets... and secrets. Macleod's return to Lewis turns out to be good both for the island and for himself.
I'm still a bit under the spell of this book, so I am very glad to know that there are two forthcoming volumes that will continue the story. I can't help but wonder if rainbows will make a reappearance in Fin's skies. show less
This isn't so much a whodunnit crime novel or police procedural as more a psychological study of a small island community and especially of the main character, Fin Macleod. Fin is a Detective Inspector who grew up on the island and left to go to university when he was eighteen. He has only been back once, on a brief visit that following year, to attend his aunt's funeral. Now he is sent back to investigate a grisly murder which bears strong resemblance to a crime committed in Edinburgh. Fin's boss is callous and unfeeling about the recent death of Fin's son, and gives him the ultimatum of going back to Lewis or quitting the force. So Fin departs, leaving his marriage to Mona in tatters.
Gradually, through interwoven chapters set in Fin's show more viewpoint, the reader learns of his tragic history on the island. He had a chequered relationship with a girl who loved him from when they were both six years old, but he treated her badly and they broke up shortly after joining University due to his unforgiveable behaviour. She returned to Lewis straight afterwards. Fin's own return to the island forces him to confront a lot of home truths and even suppressed memories.
The book is very well written with evocative descriptions of the landscape and lifestyle, and vividly realised characters. It is almost unremittingly grim, however, and requires a trigger warning for themes such as child abuse and animal welfare (a key part of the story is the centuries old custom whereby twelve men carry out an annual slaughter of gannet chicks on a remote rock in the sea (legally permitted to gather a delicacy, and in former times an essential addition to the island's food supply). This apparently is a real-life event. Altogether I would rate this at 4 stars. show less
Gradually, through interwoven chapters set in Fin's show more viewpoint, the reader learns of his tragic history on the island. He had a chequered relationship with a girl who loved him from when they were both six years old, but he treated her badly and they broke up shortly after joining University due to his unforgiveable behaviour. She returned to Lewis straight afterwards. Fin's own return to the island forces him to confront a lot of home truths and even suppressed memories.
The book is very well written with evocative descriptions of the landscape and lifestyle, and vividly realised characters. It is almost unremittingly grim, however, and requires a trigger warning for themes such as child abuse and animal welfare (a key part of the story is the centuries old custom whereby twelve men carry out an annual slaughter of gannet chicks on a remote rock in the sea (legally permitted to gather a delicacy, and in former times an essential addition to the island's food supply). This apparently is a real-life event. Altogether I would rate this at 4 stars. show less
Fin Macleod is a police officer living in Edinburgh who returns to the town he grew up in on the Isle of Lewis to investigate a murder that might have a connection to one of his Edinburgh cases. I expected this to be something like Inspector Rebus on Lewis and Harris, but I couldn't have been more wrong. Large parts of this novel deal with Fin Macleod's childhood - the chapters alternate between childhood memories, narrated by a first person narrator, and the solving of the case and the events on the Isle of Lewis in the present, narrated in third person. While I was drawn to the case at once, the childhood episodes are what make this book so special. Large parts of it rather are like literary fiction, while each episode uncovers more show more and more secrets and connections that are all a part of the mosaic and make us understand what moves these people. We learn what they lost, what they fight for, and what they hope to gain. I was totally immersed in this cast of characters and couldn't stop thinking about them all day until I could finally return to the book. The only thing that I was disappointed with is the final twist - or revelation - in the end. I think it wasn't necessary at that point to add yet another tragedy because there was already motive enough, and in my opinion, the story would have been stronger without this added backstory.
The natural world of Lewis and Harris provides a very special setting, too - very similar to Nordic Noir, it is described as bleak and unforgiving, harsh and wild, but also beautiful - and both home and means of living to a group of strong people. I have only visited these isles for two days, but I remember the landscape vividly and I think the description really fits. Wild and untamed landscapes have always touched my soul much stronger than others and this was another reason why this story totally captured me. show less
The natural world of Lewis and Harris provides a very special setting, too - very similar to Nordic Noir, it is described as bleak and unforgiving, harsh and wild, but also beautiful - and both home and means of living to a group of strong people. I have only visited these isles for two days, but I remember the landscape vividly and I think the description really fits. Wild and untamed landscapes have always touched my soul much stronger than others and this was another reason why this story totally captured me. show less
"The Blackhouse" made Peter May's reputation . It won the Cezam Prix Littéraire Inter CE for best novel in 2011 and beat "Gone Girl" to the Barry Award for best novel in 2013. It became the first book in the best-selling "Lewis Trilogy".
All of that passed me by at the time. I first encountered Peter May in his 2016 novel, "Coffin Road". I was impressed and decided to go back and see for myself what all the fuss over the Lewis Trilogy had been about.
Based on the publisher's description below, I'd have probably passed this by:
"When a brutal murder on the Isle of Lewis bears the hallmarks of a similar slaying in Edinburgh, police detective Fin Macleod is dispatched north to investigate. But since he himself was raised on Lewis, the show more investigation also represents a journey home and into his past."
It sounds like yet another police procedural about a haunted cop and a brutal killer. I was fearing an American cliché with a Scottish accent and a little local colour thrown in to make it folksy. What I got was something quite different and well worth reading.
The book has very little to do with a police procedure and everything to do with Fin Macleod. Fin's story is told twice, in parallel. Once, in the third person, detailing what Fin, the policeman, does when he returns to Lewis after more than a decade and once, in the first person, detailing Fin's experiences growing up. Peter May skillfully uses this difference in tenses and time to create a picture of Fin that somehow refuses fully to integrate. I found myself constantly asking: "how did this boy become this man?" The effect extends to other characters who we see both how Fin saw them in his childhood and as the policeman sees them today. The plot actually revolves around finding the missing pieces that will unify these two viewpoints and literally make Fin whole.
The link between memory and identity is key to this story. Fin's return to the island wakens in him a sense of himself that he has either lost or abandoned. By telling the young Fin's tale in the first person, May makes the extent of the loss clear. By telling policeman Fin's tale in the third person, May suggests a distance that may be either objectivity or denial.
The language in the book is rich without being over-blown, like the grain of well-worked wood, adding texture without distracting from the design. The dialogue is convincing and vivid. I particularly liked Fin the Policeman's confrontation with his boyhood friend, now turned Minister. Finn's contempt for the God the Minister claims to believe in and his scepticism about the authenticity of his former friend's conversion from libertine to cleric brought past and present together in a powerful way and shows how far Fin has stepped outside the society that raised him.
One of the main characters in the book is the Isle of Lewis itself. Peter May evokes a very strong sense of place and culture. It is a place that shapes the people who grow up there in the same way that the wind off the Atlantic sculpts the landscape. The culture is dominated by strong Christian beliefs and ancient Celtic traditions. Peter May doesn't present the landscape or the culture as bright little artifacts, decorating the story; he makes them integral to the people, their behaviour and their sense of self. Fin can only be understood and can only come to understand himself, in the context of this island and its people.
The book is structured to unwrap linked mysteries in the past and the present and is paced to create and sustain a tension that left me needing to reach the denouement while the writing and characterisation are so rich that I didn't want the novel to end. show less
All of that passed me by at the time. I first encountered Peter May in his 2016 novel, "Coffin Road". I was impressed and decided to go back and see for myself what all the fuss over the Lewis Trilogy had been about.
Based on the publisher's description below, I'd have probably passed this by:
"When a brutal murder on the Isle of Lewis bears the hallmarks of a similar slaying in Edinburgh, police detective Fin Macleod is dispatched north to investigate. But since he himself was raised on Lewis, the show more investigation also represents a journey home and into his past."
It sounds like yet another police procedural about a haunted cop and a brutal killer. I was fearing an American cliché with a Scottish accent and a little local colour thrown in to make it folksy. What I got was something quite different and well worth reading.
The book has very little to do with a police procedure and everything to do with Fin Macleod. Fin's story is told twice, in parallel. Once, in the third person, detailing what Fin, the policeman, does when he returns to Lewis after more than a decade and once, in the first person, detailing Fin's experiences growing up. Peter May skillfully uses this difference in tenses and time to create a picture of Fin that somehow refuses fully to integrate. I found myself constantly asking: "how did this boy become this man?" The effect extends to other characters who we see both how Fin saw them in his childhood and as the policeman sees them today. The plot actually revolves around finding the missing pieces that will unify these two viewpoints and literally make Fin whole.
The link between memory and identity is key to this story. Fin's return to the island wakens in him a sense of himself that he has either lost or abandoned. By telling the young Fin's tale in the first person, May makes the extent of the loss clear. By telling policeman Fin's tale in the third person, May suggests a distance that may be either objectivity or denial.
The language in the book is rich without being over-blown, like the grain of well-worked wood, adding texture without distracting from the design. The dialogue is convincing and vivid. I particularly liked Fin the Policeman's confrontation with his boyhood friend, now turned Minister. Finn's contempt for the God the Minister claims to believe in and his scepticism about the authenticity of his former friend's conversion from libertine to cleric brought past and present together in a powerful way and shows how far Fin has stepped outside the society that raised him.
One of the main characters in the book is the Isle of Lewis itself. Peter May evokes a very strong sense of place and culture. It is a place that shapes the people who grow up there in the same way that the wind off the Atlantic sculpts the landscape. The culture is dominated by strong Christian beliefs and ancient Celtic traditions. Peter May doesn't present the landscape or the culture as bright little artifacts, decorating the story; he makes them integral to the people, their behaviour and their sense of self. Fin can only be understood and can only come to understand himself, in the context of this island and its people.
The book is structured to unwrap linked mysteries in the past and the present and is paced to create and sustain a tension that left me needing to reach the denouement while the writing and characterisation are so rich that I didn't want the novel to end. show less
I imagine this book was shelved in the Crime section in many bookstores when it appeared. But it transcends that genre, in which a detective has to discover whodunnit. In The Blackhouse, the puzzle is more complex, and there are several discoveries in the course of the narrative, resulting in the final reveal, in which the detective uncovers a long-suppressed truth about himself.
The detective, Fin McLeod of the Edinburgh force, is foundering when the book opens. His eight-year-old boy had been killed in a hit-and-run four weeks earlier. His wife feels emotionally abandoned. He’s been on bereavement leave since the tragedy, but his supervisor is getting impatient. It’s no secret that Fin is trying for a degree from Open University; show more his commitment to remaining in police work seems minimal. We’re told it offers “his only means of escape.” From what, we ask, then learn as the story unfolds that escape has been Fin’s constant quest.
As the story unfolds, we learn that Fin’s troubles go further back. The catalyst to reveal this is a murder on his home island, Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides. The Holmes crime database, used by the UK police to track possible serial killers, suggests sending him to the scene since he had led the investigation of an unsolved murder in Edinburgh with some similarities.
He resists the assignment. His memories of home are unpleasant (although it turns out that it’s what he doesn’t remember that is the real kicker). As a youth, he was impatient to leave and never return. He’s sent nonetheless on the assumption that his local knowledge would give him an edge. But from the moment he touches down in Stornoway, he’s aware that he has become an outsider in the eyes of those he knew, which is how he feels as well. He comments more than once how much he has changed in the years since he left, and the island hasn’t. The second time he said it, I wondered if it was not the other way around.
It doesn’t make it any easier that the victim was in school with him, a bully who made Fin’s life, and the lives of many others, miserable. Only one person mourned his passing, a surprise, given an incident from their school years. This, by the way, was a nice touch, suggesting that the victim had been seen one-dimensionally — scapegoated, even.
The book alternates between chapters that narrate the surface story in the story’s present, narrated in the third person, and chapters that recount past incidents in Fin’s childhood and youth, told in the first person. The cumulative effect is that Fin’s final summer on Lewis, appropriately, contains two initiations —sex and participation in an annual hunting rite to a rocky outcrop fifty miles out to sea. That expedition goes wrong, and leaves Fin’s passage to adulthood stunted.
The Blackhouse grew on me as I read. It begins with a prologue reminiscent of a stereotypical opening of an NCIS episode (cue theme music and credits). The opening chapter was flawed by a long-time television scriptwriter’s habit of using dialogue to inform the audience. Later, the author puts words in his characters’s mouths that don’t seem like something they would say.
There was also a disconnect between the descriptions of the island and what I experienced when I visited Lewis. Much was recognizable, but the adjectives used were uniformly negative. A helpful reminder that the setting of a story is part of the fiction, even if it bears the same name as a place on the map. I came to understand that May’s word choices offered a window into Fin’s spirit. Similar use of uniformly negative adjectives came in any mention of God or the church in Fin’s recollection (even the wooden pews are “unforgiving”) until he recalls the congregation singing Psalms in Gaelic.
The weather is part of the landscape. Nearly every chapter opens with a description of wind and rain, sun and moon. On real-life Lewis, too, one is indeed more conscious of the ever-changing weather, but in the Lewis of the story, it becomes one more malevolent force weighing on Fin.
The first hint that this return to the island might be working a change on Fin is on a drive to Uig, the southern tip of the island, which he calls “some of the bleakest, most beautiful country anywhere on earth.” Significantly, the next chapter begins “in those days,” the first explicit indication that these first-person memories are in the past. And in the chapter after that, Fin tells his namesake, Finnleigh, “You might not think so now, but this is a magical place. . . . The thing is, you don’t appreciate it until you’ve been away.”
The author uses many doublets in his plot, such as sons and incidents of falling. Most effectively, there are two trips to the rock, An Sgeir, for the atavistic annual hunt for gugas, fledgling gannets. Significantly, twelve men go. While there, they not only slaughter them (a reminiscence of lambs) but communally share in eating the first they catch (the rest are taken back to Lewis; what was once a desperately needed food source is now a delicacy). Some make the trip yearly, but even once is enough to transform you into one who has been to the rock.
The first of the two trips, Fin’s abortive initiation, marks the end of his closest childhood friendship. The second, eighteen years later, with its echo of the binding of Isaac, involves Fin as the thirteenth man, who has to surmount dangerous obstacles (an ordeal by water) to reach the rock in time to prevent a human sacrifice. By succeeding, after coming to the self-knowledge long repressed, Fin is left as the book closes with a flicker of hope that he might finally have matured. On the other hand, this is the first time in hundreds of years that not a single guga is brought back. What does that bode for their tradition-bound community? show less
The detective, Fin McLeod of the Edinburgh force, is foundering when the book opens. His eight-year-old boy had been killed in a hit-and-run four weeks earlier. His wife feels emotionally abandoned. He’s been on bereavement leave since the tragedy, but his supervisor is getting impatient. It’s no secret that Fin is trying for a degree from Open University; show more his commitment to remaining in police work seems minimal. We’re told it offers “his only means of escape.” From what, we ask, then learn as the story unfolds that escape has been Fin’s constant quest.
As the story unfolds, we learn that Fin’s troubles go further back. The catalyst to reveal this is a murder on his home island, Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides. The Holmes crime database, used by the UK police to track possible serial killers, suggests sending him to the scene since he had led the investigation of an unsolved murder in Edinburgh with some similarities.
He resists the assignment. His memories of home are unpleasant (although it turns out that it’s what he doesn’t remember that is the real kicker). As a youth, he was impatient to leave and never return. He’s sent nonetheless on the assumption that his local knowledge would give him an edge. But from the moment he touches down in Stornoway, he’s aware that he has become an outsider in the eyes of those he knew, which is how he feels as well. He comments more than once how much he has changed in the years since he left, and the island hasn’t. The second time he said it, I wondered if it was not the other way around.
It doesn’t make it any easier that the victim was in school with him, a bully who made Fin’s life, and the lives of many others, miserable. Only one person mourned his passing, a surprise, given an incident from their school years. This, by the way, was a nice touch, suggesting that the victim had been seen one-dimensionally — scapegoated, even.
The book alternates between chapters that narrate the surface story in the story’s present, narrated in the third person, and chapters that recount past incidents in Fin’s childhood and youth, told in the first person. The cumulative effect is that Fin’s final summer on Lewis, appropriately, contains two initiations —sex and participation in an annual hunting rite to a rocky outcrop fifty miles out to sea. That expedition goes wrong, and leaves Fin’s passage to adulthood stunted.
The Blackhouse grew on me as I read. It begins with a prologue reminiscent of a stereotypical opening of an NCIS episode (cue theme music and credits). The opening chapter was flawed by a long-time television scriptwriter’s habit of using dialogue to inform the audience. Later, the author puts words in his characters’s mouths that don’t seem like something they would say.
There was also a disconnect between the descriptions of the island and what I experienced when I visited Lewis. Much was recognizable, but the adjectives used were uniformly negative. A helpful reminder that the setting of a story is part of the fiction, even if it bears the same name as a place on the map. I came to understand that May’s word choices offered a window into Fin’s spirit. Similar use of uniformly negative adjectives came in any mention of God or the church in Fin’s recollection (even the wooden pews are “unforgiving”) until he recalls the congregation singing Psalms in Gaelic.
The weather is part of the landscape. Nearly every chapter opens with a description of wind and rain, sun and moon. On real-life Lewis, too, one is indeed more conscious of the ever-changing weather, but in the Lewis of the story, it becomes one more malevolent force weighing on Fin.
The first hint that this return to the island might be working a change on Fin is on a drive to Uig, the southern tip of the island, which he calls “some of the bleakest, most beautiful country anywhere on earth.” Significantly, the next chapter begins “in those days,” the first explicit indication that these first-person memories are in the past. And in the chapter after that, Fin tells his namesake, Finnleigh, “You might not think so now, but this is a magical place. . . . The thing is, you don’t appreciate it until you’ve been away.”
The author uses many doublets in his plot, such as sons and incidents of falling. Most effectively, there are two trips to the rock, An Sgeir, for the atavistic annual hunt for gugas, fledgling gannets. Significantly, twelve men go. While there, they not only slaughter them (a reminiscence of lambs) but communally share in eating the first they catch (the rest are taken back to Lewis; what was once a desperately needed food source is now a delicacy). Some make the trip yearly, but even once is enough to transform you into one who has been to the rock.
The first of the two trips, Fin’s abortive initiation, marks the end of his closest childhood friendship. The second, eighteen years later, with its echo of the binding of Isaac, involves Fin as the thirteenth man, who has to surmount dangerous obstacles (an ordeal by water) to reach the rock in time to prevent a human sacrifice. By succeeding, after coming to the self-knowledge long repressed, Fin is left as the book closes with a flicker of hope that he might finally have matured. On the other hand, this is the first time in hundreds of years that not a single guga is brought back. What does that bode for their tradition-bound community? show less
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- Canonical title
- The Blackhouse
- Original title
- The Blackhouse
- Alternate titles
- The Black House
- Original publication date
- 2009
- People/Characters
- Fin Macleod; Marsaili Macdonald; George Gunn
- Important places
- Lewis, Na h-Eileanan Siar, Scotland, UK; Scotland, UK
- Important events
- Guga Hunt
- Epigraph
- That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
- A. E. Housman, “Blue Remembered Hills”
Tri rudan a thig gun iarraidh: an t-eagal, an t-eudach’s an gaol.
(Three things that come without asking: fear, love and jealousy.)
- Gaelic proverb - Dedication
- For Stephen, with whom I travelled those happy highways.
- First words
- They are just kids.
- Quotations
- Marsaili and I went down to the beach at Port of Ness. We picked our way in the dark through the rocks at the south end of it, to a slab of black gneiss worn smooth by aeons, hidden away from the rest of the world by layers o... (show all)f rock that appeared to have been cut into giant slices, stood on end, then tipped over to lie in skewed stacks. Cliffs rose up above us to a night sky of infinite possibilities. The tide was out, but we could hear the sea breathing gently on the shore. A warm breeze rattled the sun-dried heather that grew in ragged, earthy clumps on shelves and ledges in the cliff.
...someone had a fire lit in their hearth. That rich, toasty, unmistakable smell of peat smoke carried to him on the breeze. It took him back twenty, thirty years. It was extraordinary, he thought, how much he had changed in ... (show all)that time, and how little things had changed in this place where he had grown up. He felt like a ghost haunting his own past, walking the streets of his childhood.
... there was an unspoken bond between them all. It was a very exclusive club whose membership extended to a mere handful of men going back over five hundred years. You only had to have been out to An Sgeir one time to qualif... (show all)y for membership, proving your courage and strength, and your ability to endure against the elements. Their predecessors had made the journey in open boats on mountainous seas because they had to, to survive, to feed hungry villagers. Now they went out in a trawler to bring back a delicacy much sought after by well-fed islanders. But their stay on the rock was no less hazardous, no less demanding than it had been for all those who had gone before. - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Go to the football together?
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