"*** 4.35 ***

What an awesome start to this military/political Sci-fi! It grabbed me from the start and kept me engaged throughout! We have political intrigue, we have Space Marines, we have multiple alien species, we have mystery, and we have the start of a rag-tag, slapped together group of outlawed individuals, who have no idea what they have stumbled into... What more can a person ask for???!!!

So excited to get on this space adventure with one of the most kick-ass female Marines I have come across lately! Yay!😃👍"

"2 stars

Late to the party! But I did struggle through this book - and I do mean struggle. I have both the audio from Libby and a hardcover copy. During the day I tried both options - nothing helped. This is my third Wilkerson read. I have read Deluge - a short story that wasn't bad, Good Dirt - which I really didn't care much for and now Black Cake, which I cared even less about.

Yes I know I am probably on the far left with this book, but here are my reasons...
1.I have never liked a book loaded with unnecessary characters. So which one of the nine hundred characters in this book did you enjoy? Me! None of them! And to try to remember them by nick name - Ugh! - Short Shirt, Marble, Bunny, Little Man - I can go on!
2.A story that folds over and over on itself like a too thick cake batter. Doubling back time and time again. Telling us something then waiting 50 to 100 pages to finish out the reasoning behind it.
3.A woman who 'dies' three times. Come on!
4.Too many points of view - who cared about half of them?
5.No depth - just quick entry drama points - most of which fizzled out just as quick - so what good were they?
6. Prose that reads like a YA book - a very young in age YA book
7. I dont like being told what to think - throw it out there and let me decide - I don't have to be fed a story - this was simplistic, repetitious - ugh - strangle me!
8.Need I go on? I can...

I have read enough of Wilkerson now to know she is not an author I will continue to pick up. I do try to give an author a chance and I think by reading 3 of her stories, I did that. I appreciate that she has a following, but I will not be one. My number 1 and 2 reasons above - which I found in all three stories - will prevent me from ever trying her again."

"Longlisted for the 2025 Walter Scott Prize
Shortlisted for the Winston Graham Historical Prize for historical fiction with a powerful sense of place.
Shortlisted for the 2025 RSL Ondaatje Prize for books evoking the spirit of a place

If like me �� and many others - you felt that two of the very strongest books on the 2022 Booker longlist were “Small Things Like These�� and “The Colony�� then this will I think be a book you savour.

It is the fourth novel by Carys Davies �� whose previous novels have received strong media recognition (her last “The Mission House�� was the Sunday Times 2020 Novel of the Year) but no Women’s Prize or Booker recognition �� at least until now.

As explained in an excellent Author’s note �� the book draws on two historical occurrences: the Great Disruption/Disruption of 1843 when a group of some 450-500 evangelical ministers broke away from the established Church of Scotland to form the Free Church of Scotland �� the main issue in the schism being their resistance to the right of large landowners to award clerical positions on parishes on their estates.

The Lowland and then Highland clearances from the mid 18th to mid 19th centuries as the same landowners systematically cleared smallhold-tenants and the rural poor from their land to replace them with large scale (particularly sheep) farming.

The set up of the book is that one such breakaway minister �� John Ferguson �� newly impoverished and struggling to work out the economics of his new church (having resigned his paid position) agrees to a job for a landowner (his brother-in-law’s godfather �� whose estate have been hitherto laggards in enacting clearances) to travel to a remote Orkney island, survey its suitability for sheep farming and persuade its one remaining inhabitant.

When John first lands on the island and stays in the abandoned baillie’s cottage (equipped with a crude Scots/English speech, a translated gospel on which he is working, a gun he neither knows or wants to know how to use, and a beloved calotype of his equally beloved wife Mary) �� he has an accident on his first day falling off one of the cliffs and is rescued by the person he has come to remove �� Ivar �� who takes him back to his house and nurses him.

The isolated Ivar (the island’s other inhabitants all having left and even the rent visits from the landowner’s factor having ceased) who had never really thought of himself as lonely and was happy with the company of his horse Pegi - first encounters the picture of Mary and develops deep feelings for her.

So when he two days later finds the unconscious John his initial reaction is confused (as he quickly realises she is his wife) and he hides the photo ……��. but as John gradually regains consciousness Ivar realises that his feelings have transferred.

‘I have the cliffs and the skerries and the birds. I have the white hill and the round hill and the peaked hill. I have the clear spring water and the rich good pasture that covers the tilted top of the island like a blanket. I have the old black cow and the sweet grass that grows between the rocks, I have my great chair and my sturdy house. I have my spinning wheel and I have the teapot and I have Pegi, and now, amazingly, I have John Ferguson too.��

And the two form a gradual bond �� John trying to suppress in his mind the real truth behind why he came to the Island (he realises that at absolute worst Ivar thinks he has come for rent) and put off the ultimate reckoning when a boat will come to collect him and his evacuee. John is fascinated by Ivar’s Norn tongue with its hugely specialised terms for seas, mists and fogs and the two are able to communicate more and more as time goes on while also drawing emotionally closer.

Meanwhile Mary has always been concerned over John’s acceptance of the job. First on moral grounds �� John justifying the clear contradiction between the reasons for joining the free church and his dubious assistance to the very same landowners by a “Render unto Caesar�� argument. And then on safety grounds �� as she picks up that the landowner’s factor is concerned Ivar may prove violent �� and she decides to find a ship that will take her to the Island to bring John home.

In pure word-length terms we learn little of Mary, John and Ivar’s backstory but in practice Davies has a Keeganite ability to summon up a life in only a few sentences.
My only hesitation in an otherwise very strong novel is the speed at which a John still suffering presumably from some after effects of concussion (note that cleverly Davies has John imagining his surgeon friend reacting to what has happened to him “Well, for a start, being a great reader, he would probably have complained about the fashion beloved by the worst kind of contemporary novelists for inflicting catastrophic and prolonged memory loss on their characters–very likely he would have called it a cheap plot device to complicate an already complicated series of events.��) �� events that would seem to require months take place over around 3 weeks �� but given the depth of Davies research (the catalyst for the book being an early 20th Century Norn dictionary) I suspect this element has been carefully considered also. It did however cause me to feel temporarily taken out of a novel which I think is best read in a single immersive sitting.

During the whole novel, the pistol that John bought with him casts as Chekhovian shadow over the plot, and given current literary trends the direction of John and Ivar’s relationship is both inevitable and perhaps (at least on John’s side) the other unconvincing aspects of an otherwise very authentic tale.

But the way in which Davies navigates both aspects and brings the book to closure is extremely impressive.

Highly recommended. 4.5 stars.

But what most delighted Ivar–what more than anything filled him with hope and happiness–was the way John Ferguson greeted him when he came home after being away by himself at the shore or in the homefield or up on the high pasture. After two weeks, his tall, thin faced guest was always ready with an account of what he’d been up to while Ivar had been out. Still heavily padded with English, the whole thing was an excited mixture of speech and gestures in which John Ferguson told him how he’d been down to the o to wash his socks, or that he’d stayed inside because it was gruggy out, or that he’d filled the lamp from the bunki and cleaned out the greut; that he’d a quick flinter around, swept up the flogs of snyag and brought in the skerpin, or that he’d picked some snori he’d found growing in the for, scalded the flodreks and drained them and saved the flingaso to make soup, and for a little while now had been sitting in the tur, going through everything he’d written down so far on the pages of his glossary. Perhaps anyone on the receiving end of so much lively enthusiasm would have begun to feel that they were in some way the object of it all, and surely Ivar could not be blamed for starting to think, at around this time, that John Ferguson might be beginning to return his feelings.

My thanks to Granta for an ARC via NetGalley"