Angus Peter Campbell Collection

Electricity; 9781804250501; paperback

Memory & Straw; 9781912147410; paperback; Winner of the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year Award 2017

About Electricity:

Electricity brings us back to an upbringing we may not have experienced but can certainly relate to.

Taking a step back into her Hebridean childhood, Granny writes to her granddaughter in Australia, decorating her notebooks with hand-drawn scribbles and doodles. Though she may now live in Edinburgh, she relives her memories with a sense of warmth and protection.

Yet, it is more than simple nostalgia for a time she cannot return to. At its core, Electricity is about community, and what it is to involve it in your life fully. Electricity itself sparked across the Hebrides and changed the lives of its people forever. You become more than your family, friends, or even neighbours. The landscape itself floods into your DNA. It is something that you will never separate from.

This latest novel from award-winning writer Angus Peter Campbell has already garnered attention across the board. It will be not only popular with rural Scots but those who long for the simpler times they grew up in - times when we were more physically connected.

Reviews:

In pencil-written and drawing-spattered notebooks intended for her Australian granddaughter, an elderly woman, now in Edinburgh, remembers and relives her Hebridean childhood. The community thus recreated is one where modernity – its emblem the Electricity of Angus Peter Campbell’s title – collides and overlaps with all sorts of linguistic, cultural and other continuities. But this is no sentimental or elegaic excursion into a long-gone past What’s evoked here is a powerful sense of what it was, and is, to grow up amid family, neighbours and surroundings of a sort providing, for the most part, both security and happiness. - JAMES HUNTER

A beautiful portrayal of a Hebridean childhood. Elegiac and transfixing. A story of love and loss, a valediction but also a reaffirmation of joy and hope for humanity. It’s incredibly difficult to express how much the words, the gift for memory and language, in this novel have touched me. I couldn’t put it down. - SELINA SCOTT

Angus Peter Campbell’s “Electricity” is both lyrical and earthy, bringing to life a community of colourful characters and a tradition of island living that has a rhythm all of its own.  Full of warmth and wisdom and humour, it captures a society on the cusp of progress where everything – and nothing – is set to change.  Light and heat and water come to the island with the flick of a switch, but all modernisation prompts small births and deaths that bring approval and opposition in equal measure. Told through the reflective messages of a loving gran to her adored granddaughter, it is a story that is essentially about generational change, yet at its heart is a message as eternal as the island’s rocks. A beautifully gentle read, “Electricity”, tells of life and love, and the importance of embracing both the ancient and the modern. - CATHERINE DEVENEY

I loved this beautiful tale of community and what lies at its heart. The genius of this work is that we come to know the characters so intimately that we ourselves become part of their lives and story. A magic cèilidh! - KAREN MATHESON

The joy of being alive is the author’s gift to us in this book. It’s the novel I would take with me to the desert island - FR COLIN MACINNES

I enjoyed this book immensely. It reads beautifully, drawing you in slowly until it dawns on you that you’re hooked. A book which is as much an act of reverence as a work of fiction. - LOUIS DE BERNIÈRES

A joy from beginning to end. - KAREN MATHESON

An enchanting novel and a kind one ... the sentiment here rings diamond-true. - ALLAN MASSIE, The Scotsman

Electricity reflects on the gentle way of island life before the bustle and demands of the modern world took over, recalls listening to his neighbour’s wireless that night, with the commentators’ description of events in the boxing ring igniting vivid pictures in his head. - SANDRA DICK, The Herald

A wonderful tale of recollection, of time passing, family and community. - BOOKS FROM SCOTLAND

Electricity could have been written by no other author at any other time...It's a fine, warm, authentic piece of literature. - ROGER HUTCHINSON, West Highland Free Press

A wonderful and warm read that will raise spirits and gladden the heart, and is a reminder that there is no such thing as an ordinary life – every single one is extraordinary. When it comes to writing, Campbell is a true craftsman and Electricity is storytelling at its finest. - ALISTAIR BRAIDWOOD, Snack Magazine

I really enjoyed reading this beautiful new book and found it uplifting and deeply moving. The author has such a lovely turn of phrase, capturing big, important truths in seemingly simple lines. As I read, it kept reminding me of Seamus Heaney's poem The Railway Children. - MEL GROUNDSELL, Editor, Am Pàipear, Uist

Electricity is a lovely, life-enhancing read without being self-indulgent, it describes the past without being claggy or sentimental and conveys a longing for the connection and vivid personalities of a Hebridean childhood without cliched nostalgia. Although I grew up hundreds of miles south in the city of Belfast, I found myself nodding with recognition at his brilliantly authentic depiction of the eager child's mind. And there's a bonus for those without the Gaelic - reading Angus Peter in English feels like having a tiny vicarious brush with Gàidhlig itself. - LESLEY RIDDOCH

Like a Talisker savoured in front of a peat fire ‘Electricity’ is the real deal. Brimming with knowledge, simply told, the book like the dram, blooms as the scope of its ambition unfolds. This is ‘Cianalas’ the Gaelic longing for home, re-created from a technicolour Hebridean childhood by a grandparent in her Edinburgh exile. Few are better equipped than Angus Peter Campbell to chart the practical and cultural changes electricity brought to the Gàidhealtachd. Fewer still to craft a wiser or more eloquent ‘Sgeulaiche’ than Annie. - TED BROCKLEBANK

I’ve been deeply affected by reading ‘Electricity’. It’s stirred so many memories of my own childhood, so connected to Housman’s ‘blue remembered hills.’ - PETER PIDDOCK

A quirky touching novel which has as its core premise the transformation of the Hebrides through the arrival of electricity, but which is really a thoughtful reflection on the meaning of community… Campbell, who is a native Gaelic speaker from South Uist, has a poet’s eye for detail and a beautifully understated cadence to his prose. - SCOTTISH FIELD

Angus Peter has that rare talent of knowing his characters intimately, he can recite their genealogy and he knows their foibles. They are loved and cared for in a quiet maternal way, respected and protected from external predatory forces… This isn’t so much about nostalgia as a reminder of the proper rules of the game of life. - CATHY MACDONALD, Stornoway Gazette

Electricity is an amazing book, poetic, immersive, joyful. - LOUISE WELSH

There is such beauty and loveliness in Angus Peter’s writing. - JOHN DEMPSTER, The Inverness Courier

About Memory & Straw:

Winner of the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year 2017

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.

Reviews:

This novel is about living, nothing less. A glorious adventure in voices, it sifts through memory and randomness, what we retain and do not, the vividness of the fragments that inexplicably linger in technicolour, and our own, never-outgrown, absurdity. It's about land and water and fairies; the marvellous and the unavoidable, and what we finally, with due modesty, grasp as essential. An irrepressible, quite remarkable, joy.  Janice Galloway

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’.