AFTER becoming a household name with her Man Booker-shortlisted novel The Dark Room, Rachel Seiffert’s latest offering, The Walk Home, boasts the same ambition and power for which her debut novel was so praised.
This deeply-moving tale centres around Protestant and Catholic rivalries in Glasgow – in part during the Troubles in the 1990s and in part, as it is today. In the first of the two eras, newly-wed couple Graham and Lynsey move to Glasgow with their young son Stevie. But Lynsey soon realises the religiously-divided world she fled in Ireland exists in her new life .
Fast-forward 20 years and we are thrown into Stevie’s world as he secretly returns to Glasgow for the first time since he cut and run from his family. Stevie is now an adult, but the dark shadow he left behind still looms over him.
The phonetically-written dialect takes some getting used to, but it ultimately only adds to the brilliant portrait of Scottish life.
Steph Cockroft
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