The Gracekeepers
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A flooded world.
A floating circus.
Two women in search of a home.
North lives on a circus boat with her beloved bear, keeping a secret that could capsize her life.
Callanish lives alone in her house in the middle of the ocean, tending the graves of those who die at sea. As penance for a terrible mistake, she has become a gracekeeper.
A chance meeting between the two draws them magnetically to one another - and to the promise of a new life.
But the waters are treacherous, and the tide is against them.
'The Gracekeepers is enchanting and heart-tugging. If you love Margaret Atwood you'll love this' Sunday Telegraph
'A wondrous read' Stylist
'Clever and original' The Times
'Truly magical' Heat
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Glasgow-based writer Kirsty Logan’s first novel is a marvel. The Gracekeepers is set in a fantastical but not so far-fetched world where land is a shrinking commodity reserved for select landlockers and most people spend their lives at sea, as damplings. Drawing inspiration from Scottish folktales, Logan weaves a hypnotic tale about the members of a floating circus and an ethereal young gracekeeper named Callanish—one of the chosen few selected to live in isolation and bury the dead. We loved being whisked into this strange world and discovering the secret that binds Callanish to North, the orphaned girl who performs with a giant bear.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Logan (The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales) combines elements of folk and fairy tales with a near-future landscape in her debut novel. Rising sea waters have turned Earth into a series of archipelagos and its population into two types: landlockers, who control the dwindling resources on land, and damplings, who make their home on boats at sea. Callanish is a so-called gracekeeper, living in self-imposed solitude on an isolated island, taking payment in food and supplies for providing underwater burial rituals for damplings. North along with her beloved dancing bear companion is the star of a ramshackle circus that travels by boat from island to island. Both young women have secrets, and when they meet each other in the wake of a tragedy, they begin to imagine a possibility for a third kind of life, one that might bridge the divide between land and sea. The narration incorporates the voices of North and Callanish, other circus folk, and Callanish's family and acquaintances, building a convincing world. Filled with evocative images, including cruise ships transformed into itinerant revival meetings, and with classic fairy tale elements such as world trees and selkies, Logan's novel imbues what is essentially an environmental fable with the heft of myth.
