Hame

Annalena McAfee Harvill Secker €23.79

When Mhairi McPhail, a Canadian of Scottish descent, tells friends she’s leaving Brooklyn and a failed relationship to spend two years living with her nine-year-old daughter on a remote Scottish isle, they’re baffled. It doesn’t help that they pronounce Hebrides ‘He-brides’ – ‘as if it were a community of transgendered newlyweds’. Rash though it seems, Mhairi has been commissioned to write a biography of Grigor McWatt, an eccentric Scots poet and Fascaray resident.

Intricately spun from Mhairi’s diary, her work-in-progress and her subject’s own words, this searching and eloquent novel muses on identity, love and belonging.