Findings

During her husband's hospital stay for a life-threatening illness, Kathleen Jamie found herself paying very close attention to the world around her. In Findings, she offers direct, uncluttered explorations of the natural and unnatural world—seen from her kitchen window, on the streets of Edinburgh, in hospital corridors, in the Outer Hebrides. 

 

What she finds: an awe-inspiring salmon run that turns out to have been engineered so that no salmon can possibly reach the top of the falls. A disembodied doll’s head, washed up with the carcass of a whale on an abandoned island, where crofters once gathered driftwood. She wonders: "is durability still a virtue, when we have invented plastic?"

Praise

"A book of unparalleled beauty, sharpness of observation, wit, delicacy, strength of vision and rare exactness of language."—The Daily Telegraph

 

"The end result is a book made up of lovingly crafted, small-scale observations that slowly accrete in mass until a finely etched picture of modern Scotland is unveiled before the reader: a rich, highly satisfying vision of a nation."—Robin McKie, The Observer

About the Author(s)

Kathleen Jamie

The award-winning poet and essayist Kathleen Jamie was born in the west of Scotland in 1962. A part-time lecturer in creative writing at St. Andrews University, she lives with her family in Fife, Scotland.