Hovel

With shades of Olga Tokarczuk, Ali Smith, and Rachel Cusk, Hovel is a book for those fascinated by female interiority.

"[A] moody, poetic first novel (speckled through with equally moody photographs) about a homesick Scottish woman living in the Rocky Mountains whose growing fixation on ancestral rituals and memory unsettles her marriage and alienates her from the surrounding community." --The Globe and Mail

Homesickness takes many forms. Alone in the mountains because of her husband's job, occupied by little more than online video captioning she calls "kitten work," our narrator becomes fascinated by the not-long-gone life of her Scottish ancestors, a time when the lamplighter took the night off for the full moon, girls bathed their faces in morning dew, and people sang to the seals.

Her husband, however, is unsure of the emotional efficacy of cooking by candlelight, peeing in the woods, and writing vexed letters to the mayor about the birds living in the doomed aspens behind their apartment building. Especially because the letters are being read, out loud, at the town meetings attended by unimpressed neighbours. But our narrator is bewitched by the liminality of memory.

In a novel of compelling poetic precision and depth, Ross captures the lengths we go to for connection when we're alone, following threads of personal history and fascination to conclusions one can only reach when there's too much time on one's hands and it's too cold to go outside.

AILSA ROSS writes about people, place, and art for Outside, Orion, the Guardian, the BBC, and others. She grew up in the north of Scotland and lives in the Canadian Badlands. This is her first novel.