Cloudland

Nineteen-year-old American Ash Harker arrives in Crieff, Perthshire at Christmas, 1984 seeking a man called Jack Duguid, who her recently deceased mother revealed was Ash’s real father. Lonely and grieving, Ash finds companionship in the Cloudland café with the Jasmine Orchestra, a band of similarly lost souls. She befriends Jack and settles into Crieff living, makes friends, even falls in love. For the first time in her life feels like she belongs.

Hanging over her, though, is the secret of her past. She quickly realises that, whatever momma said, Jack is not her father. But who is?

Gradually, her history is unravelled and as the ghosts of the past are evoked their stories leave a lasting impact not only on Ash but on every single member of the Jasmine Orchestra.

Cloudland is a humorous but serious-minded bildungsroman exploring identity and kinship and what it means to belong. It is an exercise in pluralism and an examination of community. In the manner of Carson McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter or Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree, the novel uses a group of outsiders to cast a light on a society from which they are excluded. This gathering of the disconnected offers an oblique slant on love and suggests a pining desire to belong.