Electricity

'In pencil-written and drawing-spattered notebooks intended for her Australian granddaughter, an elderly woman, now in Edinburgh, remembers and relives her Hebridean childhood. The community thus recreated is one where modernity - its emblem the Electricity of Angus Peter Campbell's title - collides and overlaps with all sorts of linguistic, cultural and other continuities. But this is no sentimental or elegiac excursion into a long-gone past. What's evoked here is a powerful sense of what it was, and is, to grow up amid family, neighbours and surroundings of a sort providing, for the most part, both security and happiness.'  JAMES HUNTER

Angus Peter Campbell is from South Uist. He has worked as a kitchen-porter, lemonade factory bottle-washer, labourer, forester, lobster-fisherman, journalist, broadcaster, actor and writer. His Gàidhlig novel An Oidhche Mus Do Sheòl Sinn was voted by the public into the Top 10 of the Best Ever Books from Scotland in The List/Orange Awards of 2007. His poetry collection Aibisidh won the Scottish Poetry Book of the Year Award in 2011, and his novel Memory and Straw the Saltire Scottish Fiction Book of the Year in 2017.