Elspeth Barker

O Caledonia

O Caledonia! stern and wild,Meet nurse for a poetic child!Sir Walter Scott

Praise for

O Caledonia

“This is an extraordinary novel: original, beautiful yet tough, with a sympathetic outsider of a heroine whose tragic fate is depicted on the very first page.… Barker’s love of the classics, her focus on mothers and daughters, and her remarkable evocation of landscape, should mark her out as one of Scotland’s principal writers.”

— Financial Times

“Elspeth Barker’s is a wholly original literary voice.… Steeped in classical allusions, rich in Scottish and natural history, fantastical in its highly wrought characters, this coming-of-age-novella is as passionately intense as it is wittily acerbic.… Propelled by the sheer force of words, the horrors and humours plunge on, observed by an eye both youthful and perspicacious.… The reader feels unalloyed joy, and occasional winces, on every page.”

— The Independent

“O Caledonia is like a bunch of flowers. Vivid images are handed to the reader one after the other and the colours are often freakish.”

— The Guardian

“O Caledonia is a Gothic coming-of-age story, the Brontës and Poe via Dodie Smith and Edward Gorey. Funny, surprising, exquisitely written — and brilliant on the smelly, absurd, harsh business of growing up.”

— David Nicholls, author of One Day

“A sparky, funny work of genius about class, romanticism, social tradition and literary tradition, and one of the best least-known novels of the twentieth century.”

— Ali Smith

“A wonderful oddity — brief, vivid, eccentric, written with ferocious zest and black humour.”

— Penelope Lively

“Witty, civilized.… With ravishing descriptions of nature which manage to be simultaneously rapturous and precise.”

— The New York Review of Books

“A poetic and passionate description of adolescence. The words sing in their sentences. A world is evoked that has shades of the Brontë sisters and of Poe.… O Caledonia

sets dreams and longing against Scottish righteousness and judgement, and the resolution is the blade of a skinning knife."

— The Times (London)

“An absolute sumptuous treat of a book.”

— Elizabeth Macneal, author of The Doll Factory

“A poetic and blackly comic account of an unhappy childhood in a remote setting, re-created so sensuously it makes you feel the wind on the heath. Exquisite.”

— Independent on Sunday

“Beautifully written.… A remarkable debut.”

— Times Literary Supplement