Hame
A novel
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- $149.00
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- $149.00
Descripción editorial
A rich, sultry, ambitious novel about a young American writer/curator, fleeing a crumbling marriage in New York who travels with her nine-year old daughter to one of the remote islands in the north of Scotland, birthplace of her grandfather.
Commissioned to set up a museum there and to write the biography of the island's celebrated poet and chronicler, Mhairi McPhail is slowly drawn in by the complicated life she is uncovering and writing about--the Bard of Fascaray--as she finds herself being transformed, awakened by the ferocity and power of the island.
Who was the celebrated poet, Grigor McWatt, The Bard of Fascaray? What was his past? Details of his life are elusive. As Mhairi struggles to adapt to her island life and put her disappointment and troubles behind her, she begins to unearth the astonishing secret history of the poet, regarded by many as the custodian of Fascaray's--and Scotland's--soul.
In McAfee's rich novel of invented island life, she interweaves extracts from Mhairi's journal entries, her discoveries and writings of McWatt, and tales of Fascaray itself into a resonant, compelling, dimensional narrative that at its heart explores identity, love, belonging and the universal quest for home.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McAfee's long novel about a small island is at once fascinating and frustrating. It centers on Grigor McWatt, a fictional Scots nationalist bard who arrives on the (also fictional) Hebridean island of Fascaray in 1942, declares it his soul's true home, and remains until his death in January 2014. That August, Mhairi McPhail, the granddaughter of a Fascaray legend who was raised in Canada, comes to Fascaray to organize a McWatt museum and write a scholarly book on him. Mhairi has her young daughter in tow but has left her problematic husband in Brooklyn. As she struggles to reorient and reinvent herself, Mhairi discovers inexplicable gaps in McWatt's life story. The novel interweaves Mhairi's first-person narrative with excerpts from her study of McWatt and his texts, including lists and jottings from his 14,000-page Fascaray Compendium and numerous classic poems he has rewritten in Scots. Mhairi's voice is witty, and the metafictional play which, like McAfee's 2012 debut novel, The Spoiler, exploits tensions between authenticity and invention, subject and writer is clever. But the narrative's momentum and Fascaray's resonance as an emblem of both Scotland and the notion of home get buried in the avalanche of "nonfictional" detail. The novel can be tough going for anyone not fascinated by and knowledgeable about all things Scottish.
