Ghost Story

Seren Doughty is a forty-two-year-old author who has written nothing in the five years since her daughter's murder. Divorced and alone in her Edinburgh flat, Seren's only relationship has been with Alex, a library research assistant too young and eager for her. So when her former editor approaches her agent with the idea for a ghost story, Seren immediately thinks of the abandoned island of Finish in the Outer Hebrides and seizes the opportunity to commit herself to a new project. Leaving her old life far behind, she immerses herself in island life: washing in the stream, collecting driftwood for the fire and growing her own vegetables. The only building on the island - a small stone bothy - becomes home as she finally picks up her pen and attempts to write. Except Finish is not abandoned. And not as unpeopled as Seren first supposed. She soon discovers the island is alive with strange noises and echoes of a bloody massacre, events more traumatic than any fiction she might construct. Her emerging manuscript becomes dominated by the figure of the island midwife, Granny Chulainn, whose attempts to save the island's children have gone unrecorded for many centuries. Unrecorded, that is, until the arrival of Seren. Ghost Story is about a woman trying to rediscover her talent for writing in the face of unspeakable loss; a woman who must face her own considerable grief if she is to immerse herself in the world of the island. A world where greed can so easily turn to violence and violence to revenge; where peaceful solitude is also naked exposure and where the call of the past will not be silenced. Or ignored.