Alex Salmond, former first minister of Scotland, once claimed that he could always tell Scottish fiction from English. Novels, he said, reveal fundamental differences in the values of the Scots and the English.
I wonder then what he would make of Annalena McAfee’s book, Hame — about the most Scottish work of fiction that any English novelist could possibly write. So committed is the former Guardian journalist authentically to explore every aspect of life north of the Border that she learnt to speak Braid Scots — from Lallans to Doric dialects — and crafted poetry in them. Surely that makes her more Scottish than most born-and-bred Caledonians? For what drives Hame is this question of national identity and whether (like gender?) it is simply a construct.
The story focuses on an academic, Mhairi McPhail, who leaves behind her hipster life in New York to move with her young daughter to the remote fictional Hebridean island of Fascaray, where she’s agreed to write the biography of its most celebrated resident: a crotchety, English-hating writer named Grigor McWatt.
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