About The Book
On a weather‑beaten rock forty miles west of the Hebrides, they still call Skarav ‘Island of the Dead’ – a place of sheer cliffs, vanished communities and secrets buried as deep as the graves in its thin soil.
When Ethan MacGregor returns there for the first time in fourteen years, it is not for the scenery but an ultimatum: face what happened the night his first love fell from the island’s highest cliff, or lose his wife and baby daughter.
At seventeen, Donna Gillies was fearless, barefoot and the only girl Ethan ever truly loved – until she died on a moonlit August night, pregnant and broken on the rocks below a headland called The Saddle. The island has never doubted who killed her: Christopher MacGregor, Ethan’s devout father.
As a storm season closes in, Ethan makes his fated return to The Saddle, finding there the traumatised families, the politics of a shrinking island, and the dangerous loyalties of a group of friends who once believed they would all escape.
On an island where the dead are never far from the living, Island of the Dead is a tense, atmospheric thriller about faith and obsession, first love and generational guilt – and about whether the truth, once unearthed, can ever set anyone free.
About the Author
Peter May was born and raised in Scotland. He was an award-winning journalist at the age of twenty-one and a published novelist at twenty-six. When his first book was adapted as a major drama series for the BBC, he quit journalism and during the high-octane fifteen years that followed, became one of Scotland’s most successful television dramatists. He created three prime-time drama series, presided over two of the highest-rated serials in his homeland as script editor and producer, and worked on more than 1,000 episodes of ratings-topping drama before deciding to leave television to return to his first love, writing novels.
In 2021, he was awarded the CWA Dagger in the Library Award. He has also won several literature awards in France, received the USA’s Barry Award for The Blackhouse, the first in his internationally bestselling Lewis Trilogy; and in 2014 was awarded the ITV Specsavers Crime Thriller Book Club Best Read of the Year award for Entry Island. Peter now lives in South-West France with his wife, writer Janice Hally.
