A stunning novel set in the stark beauty of Orkney and the heady atmosphere of Penang in the 1930s
‘Two small, confined communities in which established connections are cut across by shifting allegiances as people come and go: in cold climate as in hot, now as then, love is a complicated, compromising business’ Times Literary Supplement
A young man leans over the railings of the ocean liner bound for the exotic shores of Penang. It is early in the 1930s and Dr Alexander Mackay is on his way to take up his post running a maternity hospital in the colony. During the voyage he meets two beautiful sisters and the seeds of a scandal are sown.
Seventy years later Edward Mackay wakes after a major brain trauma. In the hazy shadowlands of illness, he conjures the figure of his dead father, a man he knew so little about. This near-death experience provokes a move to the wilds of Orkney, where Edward joins a project to harness the tides around the island as a renewable source of energy. But in the tight-knit island community passions also run high.
‘Two small, confined communities in which established connections are cut across by shifting allegiances as people come and go: in cold climate as in hot, now as then, love is a complicated, compromising business’ Times Literary Supplement
A young man leans over the railings of the ocean liner bound for the exotic shores of Penang. It is early in the 1930s and Dr Alexander Mackay is on his way to take up his post running a maternity hospital in the colony. During the voyage he meets two beautiful sisters and the seeds of a scandal are sown.
Seventy years later Edward Mackay wakes after a major brain trauma. In the hazy shadowlands of illness, he conjures the figure of his dead father, a man he knew so little about. This near-death experience provokes a move to the wilds of Orkney, where Edward joins a project to harness the tides around the island as a renewable source of energy. But in the tight-knit island community passions also run high.
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Reviews
an island-hoping affair, alternating between present-day Orkney and 1930s Penang.
'The dual narratives of father and son run concurrently, and while Edward's near-death experience and the changes it brings about him are compelling....... told in measured but insightful prose, IN ANOTHER LIGHT is unsentimental but moving and feels all the more powerful on account of its factual origins.