Memory and Straw

Winner of the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year Award 2017

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About the Book: 

A face is nothing without its history.

Gavin and Emma live in Manhattan. She's a musician. He works in Artificial Intelligence. He's good at his job. Scarily good. He's researching human features to make more realistic mask-bots - non-human `carers' for elderly people. When his enquiry turns personal he's 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 returns to England to look after his Grampa. Travels. Reads old documents. Visits ruins. Borrows, plagiarises and invents.

But when Emma tells him his proper work is to make a story out of glass and steel, not memory and straw, which path will he choose? What's the best story he can give her?

A novel about the struggle for freedom and personal identity; what it means to be human. It fuses the glass and steel of our increasingly controlled algorithmic world with the memory and straw of our forebears' world controlled by traditions and taboos, the seasons and the elements.

About the Author:

ANGUS PETER CAMPBELL is a native of the Island of South Uist in the Outer Hebrides and was brought up there and on the Island of Seil in Argyll. He attended Oban High School where his English teacher was Iain Crichton Smith, then graduated with Honours in History and Politics from the University of Edinburgh, under the guidance of the great Marxist teacher Professor Richard Ashcraft from the UCLA who was a Visiting Fellow at the time.

His writing has won many awards over the years, including the premier Bardic Crown from the leading Gaelic organisation, An Comunn Gàidhealach. His Gaelic novel An Oidhche Mus do Sheòl Sinn was voted by the public into the Top Ten of the Best-Ever novels from Scotland. His poetry collection The Greatest Gift was reviewed as a masterpiece by Sorley MacLean, his poetry collection Aibisidh won the Scottish Poetry Book of the Year Award in 2012, and his novel Memory and Straw the Scottish Fiction Book of the Year Award in 2017. The writer, academic and singer Dr Anne Lorne Gillies has described him as ‘an international literary figure alongside the likes of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison and Laura Esquivel’.