Northern frights
Is drawn in by an atmospheric mystery set on the Isle of Skye, where the spirit world is ever-present
On the Isle of Skye in 1857, the boundary between the natural and supernatural worlds is not as clearly defined as it is elsewhere in Victorian Britain. As Audrey Hart, heroine of Anna Mazzola’s intriguing new novel, soon discovers, many people still believe in the existence of fairies and their powers over human life.
Fleeing from her oppressive London home and domineering father, Audrey has arrived on the Scottish isle in response to an advertisement for an assistant from the forbidding Miss Buchanan, sister of the local laird and a collector of the island’s folklore. She is deputed to visit the people in their crofts and write down as many of the old folk-tales as they can remember. However, the island community is not a happy one. The Highland Clearances, in which many crofter families were driven from their homes into exile or destitution, are a recent memory. Although she can speak Gaelic, Audrey is an outsider and viewed with deep suspicion. People claim not to know the old stories and mostly refuse to speak to her. Much worse is to come when she discovers the body of a young girl washed up on the beach near the Buchanan house. The death is designated a suicide but whispered rumours reach Audrey of another missing girl. The crofters believe that both girls have been taken by the Sluagh, the spirits of the restless dead which appear in the menacing shape of flocks of black birds. When yet another young woman disappears, Audrey decides to investigate.
The Unseeing, Mazzola’s debut novel, was a brilliantly twisting tale of murder and family secrets in 1830s London. Her second book takes the real, often tragic history of injustice and dispossession on the Scottish islands and uses it as the foundation for an equally gripping Gothic thriller.