Clear by Carys Davies
Best for: Those who enjoy a quiet, intimate tale. In a nutshell: John is contracted to travel to a remote Scottish island to remove the last inhabitant so that the landlord can use the land to raise sheep. Worth quoting: N/A Why I chose it: This book is very popular in Scotland at the moment, where I live. I took it with me on a trip to the Outer Hebrides, as that just seemed appropriate. Review: This book is a slow burn. While the backdrop […]
Clear: a novel by Carys Davies
I have to love when a book goes exactly where you thought it was going from the synopsis, and then goes somewhere you never even considered. Clear is very much that book. It’s set during the Scottish Clearances of the 19th century, when farmers were shuffled off the land they rented so that the landowners could make more money out of crops or livestock. John, a minister who has quit his church to help find a new one and thus has monetary issues, has been […]
Clear by Carys Davies
The idea of a historical fiction novel that sends you repeatedly running to Wikipedia usually sounds like a hefty tome, some kind of sweeping epic like Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries. But Carys Davies’s Clear is a tiny little jewel box of a novel, not even 200 pages long (or just a hair over three hours for the audiobook I listened to). But Davies takes you into the Scottish clearances, the 1843 schism in the Scottish Presbyterian church, Scots dialect, the dying Norse-derived languages of the northernmost […]
