The Lost Lights of St Kilda

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The Lost Lights of St Kilda is essentially a love story set during the last years of the island community. I am familiar with this author’s writing after reading her previous release, The Good Doctor of Warsaw. The other character I liked was Fred whose story with Archie who he met one summer is another focal point of the whole novel.

The Lost Lights of St Kilda – Atlantic Books The Lost Lights of St Kilda – Atlantic Books

I began with an image of a man in a dark WW2 POW prison cell who holds on to hope through his memory of St Kilda. When St Kilda has to be evacuated, the island community reaches breaking point and the residents must contend with a threat to their existence. This book was hard to put down and deeply moving, not only because of the lovestory of Fred and Chrissie, but also because of the beautiful history of St Kilda.

Told over two main time scales, this is the story of Fred, a university student who went to St Kildas to work, and study rock formations during the summer of 1927.

The Lost Lights of St Kilda: author interview with Elisabeth The Lost Lights of St Kilda: author interview with Elisabeth

It’s a hymn to the sterling work of French Resistance and ordinary people, often at great cost, to get Allied escapees home. I loved the descriptions of St Kilda and the details of the islanders’ life – “a daily struggle against nature”. You can’t really describe that remarkable chain of islands unless you have been blown away by the sheer beauty of the colours of the sky, the sea and the unspoilt grasslands - and blown flat by the incredible power of a Hebridean winter wind. Incorporating two timelines, this new novel from a passionate historical fiction storyteller relays a tale of two lovers, despair, hope and longing.We were lucky enough to go out to St Kilda with Sea Harris, me furiously writing down every puff of wind or change in the weather. Although a misunderstanding meant that he lost contact with Chrissie after that summer, he never forgot either her or the summer he spent on the island and in 1940, when he is a prisoner of war behind enemy lines in France, his memories of that time, and of the woman he had loved and lost, become ever more vivid.

The Lost Lights of St Kilda by Elisabeth Gifford | Waterstones

The intense devotion the families have for their children who are precious, because so many have died as infants. Equally well realised were the references to village life, the customs, rituals and expectations of living in this place.I’m the spit of my mother, with dark hair and blue eyes, but all the same I’m disappointed that neither of them look anything like me. I began to read everything I could find about the group of islands that make up St Kilda but it would be another ten years before I felt I had enough knowledge to begin to attempt to reconstruct that lost community in novel form. With the timeline switching between 1910-1930 on St Kilda, 1930-1940 on Morvern Peninsular on the west coast of Scotland, and 1940 in occupied France, and the narrative switching between the voices of Chrissie, her daughter Rachel Anne, and Fred, this is a compelling and beautifully written novel. So with Mother away I am left here alone through the long summer days, instructed to practise my piano pieces. When the woman of the house hears them speaking Gaelic, she recognizes that like her, they speak a minority (and oppressed) language.