Peter May

Island of the Dead Peter May

On a weather-beaten rock forty miles west of the Hebrides, they still call Skarav ‘Island of the Dead’ – a place of sheer cliffs, vanished communities and secrets buried as deep as the graves in its thin soil. When Ethan MacGregor returns there for the first time in fourteen years, it is not for the scenery but an ultimatum: face what happened the night his first love fell from the island’s highest cliff, or lose his wife and baby daughter. At seventeen, Donna Gillies was fearless, barefoot and the only girl Ethan ever truly loved – until she died on a moonlit August night, broken on the rocks below a headland called The Saddle. As a storm season closes in, Ethan makes his fated return to The Saddle, finding there the traumatised families, the politics of a shrinking island, and the dangerous loyalties of a group of friends who once believed they would all escape. On an island where the dead are never far from the living, Island of the Dead is a tense, atmospheric thriller about faith and obsession, first love and generational guilt – and about whether the truth, once unearthed, can ever set anyone free.