Sparks fly as award-winning author launches novel centred on Hebrides
A new work by an award-winning author born in South Lochboisdale and living in Skye is taking readers back to the time when electricity first arrived in the Western Isles.
Electricity, by Angus Peter Campbell, is a historical work capturing the hope and contradictions that electric power brought to the islands.
The novel is centred on letters from the protagonist Granny, an elderly woman living in Edinburgh, as she shares memories of her Hebridean childhood with a daughter now living in Australia.
Through Granny’s story, Campbell seeks to analyse the manner in which people connect including the modernity of the world in which Granny continues to write her letters to a distant relative contrasts with the immediate changes electricity brought to her childhood community.
However, across the generations the heart of true connections remains human interaction. In the book, Campbell writes: “Once upon a time, it seemed as if change came from the outside, like a gale-force wind, when all the time it was ourselves. But you can shelter from the wind. I look in the mirror and see the changes. Those lines on my forehead when I deliberately frown, and the way my mouth purses when I put on my lipstick.”
Campbell has drawn on island and Gaelic culture throughout his writing career. Born in South Uist, he later spent his teenage years in Oban before studying at the University of Edinburgh.
In 2007, his Gaelic novel An Oidhche Mus Do Sheòl Sinn (The Night Before We Sailed) was voted one of the Top 10 Best Ever Books from Scotland in The List/Orange Awards of 2007. Four years later, his poetry collection Aibisidh won the Scottish Poetry Book of the Year Award in 2011.
Memory and Straw, in which a successful New Yorker explores his Highland roots, won the Saltire Society Scottish Fiction Book of the Year award in 2017.
Electricity was published by Luath Press on Tuesday April 25. It is available from local bookshops.