Station Zero

Utterly Dark and the Tides of Time is published today, and I’m on my way to the Islay Book Festival, where it all began, back in 2019. Spending time on the island then reminded me that I’d been toying with the idea of writing something about an imaginary archipelago since at least my first year of art college, and I went home feeling it was probably time I got started. Utterly Dark and the Face of the Deep was the result. But on the way to Islay this time, Sarah Reeve and I have stopped off on Mull, which is the place where it really all began. Because the reason I’d been toying with imaginary archipelagos for so long must have had something to do with an earlier visit to the Hebrides, back in 1977, when my parents, my sister and I camped on the shores of Loch na Keal. This is how it looked then: And this is how it looks now: We had a lot of holidays like this, to Cornwall, Wales, the Lake District, and similar places - my parents had a thing for mountains and beaches, the more remo...

What with one thing another, Reeve & McIntyre haven’t had a chance to visit many bookshops lately - so we thought we’d send Kevin the Roly Poly Flying Pony on a grand bookshop tour for us. Kevin doesn’t know a lot about books, but he does like biscuits, and where there are booksellers there are almost certain to be biscuits… Kevin decided to begin his tour at The Celtic House bookshop on the isle of Islay. It was quite a long fly, over shining silvery sea and mountainous islands, but he was soon circling above the little town of Bowmore. The air was filled with the cry of gulls and the smell of peat from the whiskey distillery, and he could see the famous round church and the long main street running down to the harbour. The Celtic House was on a corner not far from the sea. Kevin landed outside, and was welcomed in by Colin , the owner, and Charlene , the manager. Kevin had some Very Interesting Questions for them, but first he needed biscuits. So he clip-clopped up ...