Critical Praise

"Gillies writes magnificently on everything she touches, be it family secrets, Highland light, or the nature of memory."

"There’s an echo of Virginia Woolf, especially To the Lighthouse, that lifts Gillies’s work above the average family drama . . . This is an unusual, unsettling, often lovely story that plumbs the depths of what family means."

"Gillies explores . . . the truth beginning to work its way to the surface, like a swollen and decomposing corpse . . . She excels in her portrait of a landscape that consumes the merely human—eats it for lunch, as it were—and has slowly, over many generations, created a family in its own image."

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