Music in the Dark

Sally Magnusson

From Shelf: Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, 2024 Longlist

1884. A tenement room-and-kitchen flat in Rutherglen, near Glasgow. A woman with stark injuries to her face and her mind and a man recently arrived from America spend the night together. Through facing their shared past and the brutal events of 30 years ago, they can finally glimpse a future of new possibilities.

'A wonderful and moving story, beautifully told . . . an episode of history brought vividly to life' Clare Chambers, author of Small PleasuresJamesina Ross is long finished with men. But one night a stranger seeking lodgings knocks on the door of her tenement flat. He doesn't recognise her, but she remembers him at once. Not that she plans to mention it. She has no intention of trusting anyone enough to let herself be vulnerable again. A lifetime ago Jamesina Ross was bent on becoming a writer. She had a facility with words. She made up songs about the Highland glen where she lived and the kin who had worked that land for generations. When her community was threatened with eviction, she gave voice to that too. The women stood together, defiant and determined, but Jamesina's music was no match for one of the most brutal confrontations of the Highland Clearances. Jamesina has borne the disfigurements of that day ever since, on her face and inside her head. It marked the end of a life of promise and the beginning of a very different one. Her lodger thinks that if she would only dare to open the past, she might have the chance of a future. A beautiful exploration of unlooked-for love in later life, its contrariness and its awkward, surprising joys, this is a story about resilience, memory, resurrection - and those parts of who we are that nobody can take away.