novels and novellas

QHUARRANCE

(pre-published novel,

long-listed JBA Debut Novel Award, 2023)

On the southern edge of the Grampians in the mid-1790s, an appalling crime is committed in the ancient tower of Glendoich House, an act set to unpick numerous lives, both near and far.

Against the background of bewildering change facing rural Scots at the end of the eighteenth century, the disparate characters in these twelve interconnected stories - from laird to lowest cottar - find that their hopes for the future must be abandoned; that they are all powerless in the face of social revolution and too the horrors of Glendoich House.

Qhuarrance is very loosely based a true story of child murder. The killer is someone we'll meet more than once in this tight-knit but rapidly fracturing community. Will we recognise the assassin of Glendoich?

extract from STORY ONE, DAUGHTER

(1797)

They are very kind, Mr and Mrs Gouldie.

But then The Lord Glendoich pays them money to be kind. I know this because I heard them speak of 'Glendoich's sum' as I listened through the dining-room door, after I'd gone to retire and then came back down the stairs, most cautiously because the treads can scream.

Sum is to do with numbers, as well as money, and you can’t have money without numbers - but I don't do sums now. Mrs Gouldie says girls better themselves without study. She never had any, and she the mother of four children, though all are dead. 'Every one of my babes,' she said once, in June, while I was in her flower yard and she was eating sugar cake.

But I knew from Marion, the housemaid (and they have just two housemaids and Marion the better of them, though before I came, they had many others), I knew from her that Mrs Gouldie's son was seventeen when he died of a fever and not a baby at all. And her daughter had been nine, killed by a kick of an aunt's horse. There were two infants also; one had been a year old, and died of nothing, and the other perished the day after being born, also for no good reason, for Marion says babes in big houses die like candle flames.

'So,' says Marion, 'you're an age between her two oldest and bring great comfort to Mrs Gouldie.' Then she smiles and sighs at the same time. She does this often. I think she feels pity for me, and her a servant. But she looks full at me. None of the others in the house can. Mrs Gouldie's gaze is on my chin, Mr Gouldie's on my forehead. Gracie, the other maid, won't turn her eyes entirely my direction, and I've never seen Cook Smith, who lives in the town and comes and goes by her own door.

I can't see why Marion thinks I bring Mrs Gouldie comfort. Mrs Gouldie is much benevolent, but so often wants to be somewhere else. After a few minutes in my company, she says things like, 'Well, Egidia, sweet girl, I have many tasks to administer today and must attend to them. Call Marion or Gracie when you require assistance.'

She thinks I can't open the outward doors of the house or play without the servants, or that I don't know she's in her sitting room and at her needlework all the time she says she's overseeing business.

EMERITUS

(pre-published novella)

Willie Munro's shrewd yet restless ruthlessness has taken him from rural poverty to international academic acclaim, albeit within the context of a tiny and bizarre discipline. With near-absolute dominion over his claustrophobic world, he's seen his most outrageous desires become reality, time after time. No-one, however, can rise for ever. Lying in a hospice as the twentieth century winds to a close, drugged and unable to move, Willie has no tricks left. He can't escape the figure that draws close to his bedside almost nightly, someone who seems intent on narrating every detail of his own life story back to him.

Why - and far more importantly how - is the damnable creature doing that?

CLAVOS VALLEY

(novel in-progress)

In the south-eastern uplands of the United States lies the suffocatingly forested Clavos Valley, and within that, The Box, an entirely glass-walled house. The building is of state-of-the-art design but already has history.

When an overweight, world-weary Englishwoman arrives to sit the house, she has no option but to study her own reflection every night in the vast black windows. Weeks then months of solitude pass and the woman comes to dread another image which increasingly appears beside her in the night-time glass; the figure of a musician - young, slim and merciless.

extract from CHAPTER ONE

'Which mountains?' I asked.

Henny, an American from university days, one of the few who'd made the effort to keep in touch, knew nothing about that part of the country and very little about Jon, the owner of The Box, this despite Jon being a friend's brother. 'The usual mountains, I guess,' he said. The line buzzed.

The only thing Henny proved right about was the architecture. This is a glass cube, a cube that's been pulled up at one corner for run-off, but also, I'm convinced, to goad the viewer. Whether this is to admiration, rumination or unease I can't tell. Almost, but not quite, a perfect cube in a headlong valley which is nearly - but of course can't be - untouched by man. There are still places like that in America; folds, stretches, swathes even, where you can pretend that you're alone.

So why would I refuse?