This spare, deadpan and unvarnished portrait of life on Lewis and Harris by the Saltire Prize–winning author of Bleak: The Mundane Comedy, is a foil to the picture postcard version. Island life as it was and is, with its rip tides and contradictions. Lyrical, unsentimental, often funny, this is not the curated Hebrides of lonely crofts and empty moorland, but a live, working place: of council estates and supermarkets, industry and hardship, memory and change. A deeply personal and original tribute to a place, too often flattened into cliché. Laced with affection, seasoned with salt. No sugar.