The Stolen Hours by Karen Swan: a plot teeming with secrets, island superstitions, questions of faith and loyalty – book review –

At the age of eighteen, and the eldest girl in a family of nine children living in a cramped stone cottage, Mhairi knows only too well that she has no option but to find a husband... but leaving St Kilda and moving to another island to wed a stranger has never been in her reckoning.

If you fell in love with 2022’s smash-hit read, The Last Summer, the first of a historical Wild Isle series from bestselling author and master storyteller Karen Swan, then this return visit to St Kilda – in the months before its last ever inhabitants were evacuated – will be Gaelic music to your ears.

With sweeping and deliciously romantic stories at their heart, these epic tales of endurance, hardship, and love against the odds, were inspired by the true history of St Kilda – now an uninhabited seabird haven and World Heritage Site – a remote archipelago which towers out of the storm-tossed waters of the Atlantic and has a unique past.

And after leaving her readers with a cliffhanger ending, and a mysterious death unsolved, in our first visit to St Kilda, Swan is back to her island of secrets for another gripping chapter in the lives and loves of three young friends whose individual stories are told in parallel time, but whose fortunes and misfortunes tell different tales.

It’s the dying days of summer in 1929 and the heady days of Mhairi MacKinnon’s childhood on remote Hirta, St Kilda’s largest island, are behind her now because their small settlement needs every set of strong hands and legs it can get.

Everyone Mhairi knows – not least her two close friends Effie Gillies and Flora McQueen – lives on the isle and with a large family to feed and clothe, her village postmaster father Ian has made it clear that he can’t support Mhairi past the coming winter.

Husband options are limited and the already swelling autumnal waves, and the arrival of landlord Sir John MacLeod’s factor, Frank Mathieson, his ‘man on the ground,’ for the last of his two annual visits are a reminder that St Kilda is preparing to be cut off from the mainland until spring.

But the MacKinnons’ neighbour, Donald McKinnon, one of the island’s whalers, has a business acquaintance on the isle of Harris – a ten-hour boat ride away – whose son is also in need of a spouse and Donald offers to chaperone Mhairi there on his final crossing of the year.

Terrified at the thought of marrying a man who lives on the ‘Other Side,’ Mhairi feels like her father has ‘taken a sledgehammer to her life and smashed it wide apart’ but she agrees to travel to Harris to meet young Alexander McLennan and returns an engaged woman.

The only problem is that she is in love with the wrong man... a man who can never be hers. And as she dreads the spring when she will be sent from home to become a stranger’s wife, word arrives that St Kilda is to be evacuated.

It means the lovers are granted a few more stolen hours together, but those last days on St Kilda also bring heartache for Mhairi and her friends. And, when a dead body is discovered on the abandoned isle, they all find themselves under the shadow of suspicion.

It’s easy to see why Swan has been dubbed the queen of epic romances... this new romantic odyssey, which unfolds amidst some of the most rugged and exhilarating scenery in the British Isles, tingles with mystery, drama, and a torrid tale of forbidden love that grips from first to last.

Immaculately researched and told with the flair and finesse that we have come to expect from this accomplished writer, The Stolen Hours brings vibrant new life to the fascinating island of St Kilda as we are immersed in its unforgiving climate, the daily grind of a hand-to-mouth existence, and the social complications that arise from living in such a small and tight-knit community.

With echoes of The Last Summer’s star player Effie Gillies’ story drifting through the action, Mhairi’s desperate plight takes centre stage, and as the spectre of being forced to evacuate the only home that the islanders have ever known draws inexorably closer, the tension builds with each turn of the page.

Expect a plot teeming with secrets, island superstitions, questions of faith and loyalty, and the unbreakable bonds of friendship as we travel with Mhairi into an unknown and uncharted future... but with an intriguing core mystery still to be solved, Swan’s fans will be already chomping at the bit for the next visit to St Kilda.

(Pan, paperback, £9.99)