John Finlay is fleeing from failure. His engineering business has failed. His relationship has failed. His flight from debts leads him to disaster – and to the Island, where he must learn to live anew.
Dermot, pulling a boy barely alive from the water, has never seen anyone so strangely dressed. His Celtic island knows nothing of debt, nor engineering. Where has this man come from?
John struggles to accept that he has been carried across time and into another world – both like and unlike his own. How he got there is a mystery. But John, the foreigner, must turn slowly into Dhion, the Islander.
Still, he brings with him unfinished business that must be faced, and ideas that may not always be welcomed. Meanwhile Dermot, consumed with a growing jealousy, develops his own deadly agenda.
The whole community finds itself caught up in what becomes a matter of survival – or transformation. A tale of loss and change. A spiritual inquiry. And a love story.
Ceredigion author A G Rivett claims to have lived several lives in the course of his one life. Born in London, raised in the Home Counties, he has been a doctor, a priest, and a crofter in the Scottish Highlands. He has lived in rural Northern Nigeria and knows what a simpler life looks like, less dependent on technology. He now lives in West Wales with his wife, Gillian Paschkes-Bell, who works with him as a writing team. There, he grows fruit and vegetables and has sewn a wildflower meadow. He has three daughters and two grandsons.
My thoughts: John finds himself on an island that might be a bit like a lost Scottish/Irish one, where people speak sort of Gaelic/Celtic language, where Christianity has mixed into their traditional beliefs, and where they still believe in the sidhe (the fae/faeries/fair folk) as well as God the Father and Gaia the Mother.
John is unable at first to communicate with his rescuers, they don’t understand his modern English, too far removed from its mish-mashed roots in Latin, French, Greek and Germanic languages. He slowly learns their language and tries to adapt to the very different way of living, something closer to the way people lived a thousand years ago or so when the Anglo-Saxons and Norse lived in England.
As he adjusts to the island life, he forms relationships with some of the villagers he lives among, attempts to find work he can do, as an engineer he’s keen to build things and introduce some technology to the place. One of the young women becomes interested in him, and this adds to the enmity Dermot, a young man there, begins to feel, seeing John as his rival. A rivalry John does not feel.
Offered a chance to return to his own time and world, John must choose the life he has found on the island, or the one he was running from – his business, his family and Helen, the woman he left behind. Can he start again there or has the life he has begun to build amongst the islanders become his real life?
An interesting and imaginative book, would we, if offered a similar chance to begin somewhere new, choose it or return to our technologically advanced but disconnected one? Thought-provoking and intriguing.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of the book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
💛💙 Thank you so much for being a part of this adventure x
LikeLike