Hame

by Annalena McAfee 592pp, Harvill Secker, £16.99, ebook £9.99

McAfee’s enjoyable second novel, set on a Scottish island around the time of the 2014 independence referendum, revolves around a dead, fictional poet, Grigor McWatt, whose life’s work had been to translate the English lyric canon into Scots. (Rupert Brooke, for instance, becomes: “Here’s some neuk o furrin lea/That is aye Scotland”). An academic, Mhairi, exhumes the secrets of McWatt’s life, while the novel winks to any film or book that’s ever been set on a Scottish isle. These pastiches are fun, but slow it down. Sam Kitchener