Memory and Straw

Sebastian and Emma live in Manhattan. She’s a musician and he works in Artificial Intelligence, researching human features to make his company’s mask-bots more realistic. But his enquiry turns personal, and he is forced to ask whether his own life is an artificial mask. Delving into family stories and his roots in the Highlands of Scotland, he embarks on a quest to discover his own true face, ‘uniquely sprung from all the faces that had been’. He travels. Reads old documents. Visits ruins. Borrows, plagarises and invents. But when Emma tells him his proper work is to make a story out of glass and steel, not memory and straw, what path will he choose? A novel that takes us from Wall Street to the Scottish Highlands, via Martha’s Vineyard and Oxford, to the final denouement in Rome.

Angus Peter Campbell Angus Peter Campbell lives in Skye, and has previously published a number of works in Gaelic. In 2001, he was awarded the Bardic Crown for Gaelic Poetry, as well as the Creative Scotland Award. His Gaelic novel An oidhche mus do sheol sinn (The Night Before We Sailed) was included in The List 100 Best Scottish Books of All Time. As well as being an author, Campbell has also worked in newspapers, radio and film, with a leading role in the Gaelic language feature film, Seachd: The Inaccessible Pinnacle