Description
Book Synopsis"A bright book and a brilliant book." - Robert Macfarlane. Peter MacAulay sits down to write his will. The process sets in motion a compulsive series of reflections: a history of his own lifetime and a subjective account of how key events in the post-war world filter through to his home, Stornoway. He reveals his passions for history, engines and fish, and witnesses changing times – and things that don’t change – in the Hebrides. The novel is driven by its idiosyncratic narrator, but with counterpoints from people he engages with – his father, mother, wife, daughter, friends. It’s all about stories, a litany of small histories witnessed during one very individual lifetime.
Trade Review“It is a Waterland for the Outer Hebrides...it’s a major landmark in fiction of the islands...it’s a landmark in Scottish literature and contemporary fiction more broadly...makes cunning shifts into para-memoir, pseudo-biography, hints of the documentary, but it’s always mobile, always moving. Line for line, the voice was so lively, so inventive, that I relished each paragraph ... Story within story, concentrically nested, or maybe hung like hooks on a line to catch the readers... It’s a bright and vivid and true book, and a work of literature, unmistakably.” -- Robert Macfarlane.
“It’s absorbing and riveting. There’s not a single paragraph in A Book of Death and Fish when we are not engaged by the vigour and jump and insistence of his voice.”
"Stephen brings a contained concentration and intensity to his chapters that is mesmerizing and true in a deeper way."
"Dense, compelling and wildly idiosyncratic, it’s a novel that splits the form open like a fresh catch, glistening and raw and singing with the sea.” -- Kirsty Gunn
"A Book Of Death And Fish may well take its place beside Moby-Dick...It will, I suspect, be one of those books I will not put down all my days." -- Candia McWilliam
"A fine, far-reaching and and sensitive book."
"An excellent, enjoyable and engaging read.”
"Ian Stephen has excavated the life and the places that he knows to write a big, sprawling kaleidoscopic and often brilliant book. It is an heir to Neil Gunn as well as to Kevin MacNeil’s 'The Stornoway Way'. -- Roger Hutchinson * West Highland Free Press *
