The water all around us. Questo articolo non è disponibile.The water all around us

When you are alone, adrift and displaced, how do you find yourself?

Set on a small Scottish island, The Water All Around Us is a poignant novel about loneliness, roots and belonging. 

Recently arrived, crofters' child, Fenn, is troubled by being different and not fitting in. Incomer and marathon swimmer, Jess, is running away from personal tragedy. A young whale, separated from his pod, swims in the wrong direction and embarks on an arduous, heart-breaking journey. All three are at home in the water, but when their lives connect in the sea that fringes the white-sand beaches, their paths converge and collide with disastrous consequences.

Under the surface of this thought-provoking novel are messages, carried quietly and bravely by the whale, about the damage we are doing to our oceans.

My seventeen books cross-cross genres, a publisher's nightmare. They include a writing scheme for primary schools, Write From the Start (Longman) a book recording the experiences of thirty people with severe Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Shattered:Life with ME (HarperCollins), and the authorised biography of the surrealist painter, Rosa Branson (Linen Press). Two books are close to my heart: White Lies, my debut novel, was runner-up in the Robert Louis Stevenson Award. Spanning four generations and set against the backcloth of the 1950s Mao Mao uprising in Kenya, it tells the story of an adulterous love affair between a soldier's wife and an intelligence officer who understands Africa. The Red Beach Hut is about a fine but fated friendship between two outsiders, a gay man and a misfit boy, who meet on a windswept English beach. Society's warped gaze endangers both of them.I have recently moved, after twelve years in southern France, to a remote croft in the Western Isles. I live in a caravan with views of sea and islands, and look after brown and black sheep.