Karin Altenberg – författare

Longlisted for the Orange Prize 2012. 1830. Neil and Lizzie MacKenzie, a newly married young couple, arrive at the remotest part of the British Isles: St Kilda. He is a minister determined to save the souls of the pagan inhabitants; his pregnant wife speaks no Gaelic and, when her husband is away, has only the waves and the cry of gulls for company. As both find themselves tested to the limit in this harsh new environment, Lizzie soon discovers that marriage is as treacherous a country as the land that surrounds her.

Steeped in its bleak and beautiful landscape, Mortford is a place of secrets and memories: of bitter divisions and shattered dreams. Returning to this Dartmoor village where he grew up, Gabriel attempts to come to terms with what he lost as a boy so long ago. Slowly the mysteries hidden in this small community on the edge of the moors begin to unravel. But one of Gabriel's memories remains sharper than all the others: that of his boyhood friend Michael, the tenderness of their first summers and the violent betrayal that destroyed it. And, intruding on his self-enforced isolation, the beautiful Mrs Sarobi, meddling Doris Ludgate and the frightful spectre of Jim of Blackaton will become bound in with Gabriel's search for acceptance and the possibility of love. In her striking, lyrical prose, Karin Altenberg imagines what it is to be incomplete. Set in this haunted landscape, a mesmerising tale is told of the ways in which something once broken in two may, finally, be made whole.