When he discovers that he may be the rightful heir to his uncle’s estate, he finds himself kidnapped and cast away on a desert isle. The young orphan David Balfour is sent to live with his Uncle Ebenezer. The past has haunted Wedderburn ever since Culloden, and ever since he last saw Knight, in court twenty-four years ago, in a case that went to the heart of Scottish society, pitting master against slave, white against black, and rich against poor.ģ1. He brought with him Joseph Knight, a black slave and a token of his years in the Caribbean.Now, in 1802, Sir John Wedderburn is settling his estate, and has hired a solicitor’s agent, Archibald Jamieson, to search for his former slave. In the 1770s, he returned to Scotland to marry and re-establish the family name. It is a book that the Virginia Woolf of A Room of One’s Own would instantly understand.Įxiled to Jamaica after the Battle of Culloden in 1746, Sir John Wedderburn made a fortune, alongside his three brothers, as a faux surgeon and sugar planter. With superb artistry and startling intimacy, it brings us into the life of Catherine McKenna ― estranged daughter, vexed lover, new mother, and musician making her mark in a male-dominated field.

The award-winning Grace Notes is a compact and altogether masterful portrait of a woman composer and the complex interplay between her life and her art. Acclaimed on publication for marking a brave new direction in the course of Scottish fiction, Electric Brae is a story of love and loss, loyalty and betrayal, and fathers and children. But the world is changing, and, lying next to him, Conn’s father Tam has decided that his son’s life will be different from his own.Īt the centre of Electric Brae is the crumbling sea-stack of the Old Man of Hoy and the consuming relationship between a young artist, Kim, coldly passionate, talented, secretive, and Jimmy, a North Sea roughneck, engineer and climber. Newborn Conn Docherty, raw as a fresh wound, lies between his parents in their tenement room, with no birthright but a life’s labour in the pits of his small town.

Izzy's War by Isla Dewar