Degrees of Illusion

'Scott is a clever and accomplished writer who turns his hand neatly to fiction.' The West Highland Free Press

'The author's writing abilities remain unerringly intact … Mr Scott has style to spare' John MacLeay, The Scots Magazine

'…the work of the born raconteur...' Alan Taylor, Scottish Review of Books

(Reviews of some of the author's other works.)

A car accident, two mysterious deaths - similar yet separated by a century - take Niall Fraser to the far north on a quest for answers…and ultimately to revelations more devastating that he could ever have imagined. Escaping to a new life by returning to a remote northern community he once visited in his youth, he hopes to unlock a secret from his past. He arrives in Greenland at the beginning of winter – the 'long night’, a time of dangerous susceptibility to the northern madness of Cabin Fever – with all his worldly possessions and an obsession with an Arctic explorer who died under strange circumstances a century earlier; and whose life becomes increasingly intertwined with his own. As he pursues his quests he falls for a woman who becomes another enigma he has to solve, along with the death of a young woman and a plot which threatens the survival of the community.
Greenland is a country which has never had political leaders and never known war but is in a state of rapid change. Woven around true events and set against a background of conflicts – unresolved trauma, clashes of cultures, traditional versus modern, rising political activism, exploitation and anachronistic colonialism – this is a book about the arrogance of belief that indigenous knowledge is worthless unless backed by science, that having power is justification for using it, that the Arctic is a wasteland inhabited by an inferior people.
It is a book about love, unrequited fatherhood and rites of passage for those who dare to embrace the unknown.