Carys

The year 1843 was momentous in the Scottish Church. After years of protest at the right of landowners to confer clerical livings on ministers of their choosing, a third of ministers broke away from the established church to form the Free Church of Scotland. Conscience came at a price. Stripped of their parishes, their manses and their incomes, many of the rebels found themselves penniless.At the same time, Scottish landowners were engaged in the final throes of the Clearances, a century-long endeavour to expel tenants…

It’s 1843, and along with hundreds of his fellow ministers, Reverend John Ferguson has broken away from the Church of Scotland to form a new denomination. His zeal is dented only by the worldly question of how he and his wife, Mary, are to survive without his stipend, which is why he agrees to sail to a tiny island halfway to Norway. Dispatched with scanty provisions and a pistol, he must inform its lone inhabitant, a crofter named Ivar, that he’s to be evicted as part of the Highland Clearances.So begins Carys Davies’s…