White Male Heart

The story of a friendship, forged in the wilderness of the Scottish Highlands, that goes disturbingly, shockingly off the rails...

'He has a novelist's eye for the beauty of the landscape and the shape of its contours. His descriptions...are elegiac in their intensity, and he has a sureness of touch which comes from a real understanding of the countryside...this is a novel of startling originality, an absorbing psychological thriller as well as a deft portrayal of friendship and betrayal. Nicoll writes fluently and well'

'Spectacular, page-turning...sweeping and assured'

'A novel of startling originality, an absorbing psychological thriller as well as a deft portrayal of friendship and betrayal'

'Eerily impressive...Nicoll produces prose both rhapsodically beautiful and red in tooth and claw, marking out this modern gothic tale'

'Will leave you breathless. This is a bleak novel whose tensions build flawlessly into a shocking denouement'

'The excitement and disquiet gained spectacular, page-turning momentum...There are many highlights in Nicoll's sweeping and assured narrative...but the real star of White Male Heart is the Highlands...it is his supreme gift that he pulls this off on the page. He creates a backdrop so vivid that it becomes integral to the action...Meaty stuff indeed'

'An explosively violent début...Nicoll reveals himself every bit as much a natural-born writer...lighting the fuses for his Highland Götterdämmerung'

'At once both brutal and beautiful...White Male Heart owes an obvious debt to Iain Banks's The Wasp Factory and a less obvious one to Andrew Greig's Electric Brae, both also remarkable debut novels by Scottish men, but Ruaridh Nicoll stakes out a corner of the territory that is uniquely his. The quality of the observation is breathtaking ...this is an absorbing and uncomfortable read, raising as many questions as it answers about what it means to be a young man in a territory where the roles are few and growing more limited with every passing year. But White Male Heart has far wider relevance than that. This is a novel that is both heart-rending and heart-stopping but which never loses sight of the importance of the blackest of humour. It is without question a welcome and worthy addition to the growing sub-genre of tartan noir'

Ruaridh Nicoll was born in Arbroath, Angus, in 1969 and raised in the Highland county of Sutherland. An award-winning journalist, he has been the Observer's US correspondent and the Guardian's Southern Africa correspondent. He's currently editor of the Observer Magazine. The acclaimed White Male Heart was his first novel and his second, Wide Eyed, is also set in rural Scotland. Ruaridh Nicoll dvides his time between London and Edinburgh.

In the magnificent wilderness that is the Scottish Highlands, Aaron and Hugh have been friends for as long as they can remember, bound by a shared affinity for their surroundings and an increasing sense of alienation from the remote, close-knit community that is their home. 
 
But when a young woman - fleeing life in the city and a broken love affair - moves to the area, the ties that bind the boys are slowly, irrevocably stretched to near-breaking point. And as the strain on Aaron and Hugh's friendship builds, so the violence that is endemic in the land begins to infect them both. Driven to the very edge of reason, they turn on their world to vent their frustration and anger and hurt in the only way they know, embarking on a spree of quite horrific destruction...

Ruaridh Nicoll

'Absorbing...while the narrative is well-crafted and builds to a bravura climax, it is in the evocation of atmosphere, that elusive art, that Nicoll really earns his spurs'

'A quietly spooky tale...unsettling and oddly exhilarating'

'Emotionally-wrought...in turn lyrical and violent, fable-like and gutsy'

'Nicoll writes intricate, accurate prose and offers alluring descriptions of the Scottish landscape...The landscape of Wide Eyed is beautiful and the situation is fascinating'

'Lyrical and compelling...Another triumph'

'A quietly spooky tale...Part of the strength of the book as a thriller is the artful way Nicoll manipulates our sympathies...it is in the evocation of atmosphere, that elusive art, that Nicoll really earns his spurs. He is the master of everything from simple natural descriptions that have the limpidity of a watercolour to extravagantly gothic episodes in darkened churchyards. Weird events are set against equally weird backdrops: from RAF jets roaring across a cloudless sky to the burning pyres associated with foot-and-mouth disease. The result is a novel that is both unsettling and oddly exhilarating'

'Nicoll writes intricate, accurate prose and offers alluring descriptions of the Scottish landscape...The landscape of Wide Eyed is beautiful and the situation is fascinating'

'The writing is lyrical and compelling and, for all the novel's emotive subject matter and intermittent violence, Nicoll's portrayal of grief, and the need to make sense of calamity is never less than convincing. Another triumph'

'Asked to condense a review of Ruaridh Nicoll's second novel into just one word, I would have to plump for atmospheric. I could also say riveting, or dramatic - or even entertaining. Indeed it is all of these but, for me, it is the all-enveloping atmosphere of Galloway that leaves the deepest impression on the reader. This is a truly grand second novel...his descriptive writing is of the highest quality...a beautifully told tale - and you will not be disappointed with the ending'

'An emotionally-wrought novel, in turn lyrical and violent, fable-like and gutsy, in which many of its characters are on a quest to find out who they really are'

'A claustrophobically tense novel, Wide Eyed combines Nicoll's profound love of the Scottish landscape and its people with a journalist's eye for topicality...a writer who intends to become as prominent a part of the literary landscape as the cliffs and mountains from which he draws his inspiration'

A remote fishing village in Scotland seems the perfect place for Betsy Gillander to abscond for a few days with her fiancé. There, in a landscape marred only by a vast MoD range away to the west, the pale winter sun lights up this next step in her happy and structured life. 
But then a violent storm wraps itself around the village and for three days the couple are trapped in their hotel. The enforced intimacy opens Betsy's eyes to the indolent cruelty of the man she's agreed to marry, while in the hotel bar the locals gather, increasingly anxious for news of a boat still out at sea. 
By the time the sun reappears, Betsy's fiancé has left her and she is adrift in a community shattered by the loss of the boat and seven of its sons. The pain of her break-up in the face of such tragedy produces in her a terrible guilt and Betsy finds herself drawn into a cloistered, close-knit community with a morality far beyond her understanding...

Wide Eyed

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Praise for Wide Eyed

'Absorbing...while the narrative is well-crafted and builds to a bravura climax, it is in the evocation of atmosphere, that elusive art, that Nicoll really earns his spurs'

'A quietly spooky tale...unsettling and oddly exhilarating'

'Emotionally-wrought...in turn lyrical and violent, fable-like and gutsy'

'Absorbing...while the narrative is well-crafted and builds to a bravura climax, it is in the evocation of atmosphere, that elusive art, that Nicoll really earns his spurs'

'A quietly spooky tale...unsettling and oddly exhilarating'

'Emotionally-wrought...in turn lyrical and violent, fable-like and gutsy'

'Absorbing...while the narrative is well-crafted and builds to a bravura climax, it is in the evocation of atmosphere, that elusive art, that Nicoll really earns his spurs'

'A quietly spooky tale...unsettling and oddly exhilarating'

'Emotionally-wrought...in turn lyrical and violent, fable-like and gutsy'

Books by Ruaridh Nicoll

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