Here's a strange one - a novel written and published in both Gaelic and English at the same time. Aonghas Phadraig Caimbeul, as the other edition of the book calls him, is an award-winning Gaelic writer who advertises his skill and the quiet virtues of his culture in this at-times-wonderful evocation of lost and found love.
The book’s key event is a moment where nothing actually happens - the narrator passes a girl on a staircase on a ferryboat in the Western Isles. He is forever smitten, haunted by that moment, doomed to live a half-life . . . until he meets her again, in exactly the same circumstances, decades later.
It’s a weird boldness to rely on such a crazy coincidence, but such is the often dreamy flitting between the present and the past, between real events and stories, that Campbell actually gets away with his plot twist.
This unlikely but memorable love-story is complemented by others, including a particularly touching portrait of an old and very contented couple. All against the magnificent backdrop of the Western Isles.