Evie Wyld won the Miles Franklin Award for her last novel, All the Birds, Singing. Her latest, set on the coast of Scotland, contains both beauty and violence.

The Bass Rock opens with a small girl, who we will shortly meet as the grown-up Viv, finding the body of a woman in a suitcase on the beach. As her mother cries, ‘Come away, come away,’ the child sees inside the suitcase:

… an eye that seemed to look back at me, that seemed to know something about me and to ask a question and give an answer. In the memory, which is a child’s memory and unreliable, the eye blinks.

And thus Evie Wyld sets out her two main themes: violence against women, and the uncanny. In true Gothic style, we meet wolves, foxes, visions, ghosts. A sinuous thread of unease runs through it all, at times shading into explicit danger. Continue reading →