About the Book:

‘They say he brought back some Spanish gold and others say he didn’t bring anything except the rags he was wearing but had the power to turn stone into gold and that the two stories somehow got mixed up.’

Did Olghair MacKenzie steal alchemical secrets from the Egyptians? Or was he a rebel pirate who found refuge on a small Scottish island after the Armada? Does his treasure still lie hidden there?

Six hundred years after MacKenzie’s death, an ex-footballer returns to the island where he spent his youth. As the first frosts of winter arrive, Jack moves into a fisherman’s cottage fragrant with the scent of the sea. After many restless years, it is a true homecoming. Delighting in his employment as postie, he starts to reconnect with himself, with his family and with this tiny community.

The tale of Olghair MacKenzie has fascinated Jack since childhood and he resolves to discover the truth behind the legend. To do so, he must unlock the secret of a bridge the shape of a perfect wave, understand the significance of stone number 759 and find out what is meant by the eighth moon. Can Jack trust the dreams of the local seer, or grasp the clue in the old Gaelic way of counting the months?

Jack’s quest is truly magical, for it will lead him into very personal territory, unveiling links that tied him to the island long before he ever set foot there.

Praise for Electricity:

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