Cianalas: the Gaelic for homesickness, with added melancholy and nostalgia. A yearning for the hearth. An ache to return. R.M. Murray paints a portrait of life on Lewis and Harris in a collection that is spare, deadpan, unvarnished as the land that has shaped him. His series of evocative vignettes peels back the postcard myth of the Hebrides to reveal something truer, more human capturing island life in all its contradictions. This is not the curated Hebrides of lonely crofts and empty moorland, but a living, working landscape: council estates and supermarkets, industry and hardship, memory and change. A vividly rendered collection of distinctive smells and sounds, gales, foghorns, bog and rock, machair, white sands and aquamarine seas. Lyrical, unsentimental, often funny, Murray s pieces offer an original and fresh kaleidoscope of a place and community too often flattened into cliche. Laced with affection they may be, but there s no sugar.
