‘It’s a woman’s thing, creation,’ says Sarah,a girl accused of witchcraft in 18th-century Scotland, in one of the three storylines in Evie Wyld’s powerful new novel. Sarah is pregnant, having been raped and nearly killed. She is looking at a piece of sacking sewn by a sister and mother, and continues: ‘You can see how they felt in each stitch, you can hear the words they spoke to each other and into the cloth.’ The Bass Rock is in many ways an amplification of these words spoken into the cloth, a feminine counterforce to the masculine violence that pulses viscerally throughout.
Stitched around Sarah’s story are Viv’s contemporary thread, and Ruth’s in the 1950s; all three take place in Scotland, in the shadow of the looming Bass Rock of the title. We first encounter Viv doing a late-night supermarket shop on her way to clean out her great-aunt’s and grandmother’s house, when a stranger, Maggie, offers her a choc ice, then warns her about a man hiding behind her car.
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