Editions

The Gloaming

The Gloaming

'The best lives leave a mark.' A bewitching tale of first love, shattering grief, and the dangerous magic that draws us home

Mara’s island is one of stories and magic, but every story ends in the same way. She will finish her days on the cliff, turned to stone and gazing out at the horizon like all the islanders before her.

Mara’s parents – a boxer and a ballerina – chose this enchanted place as a refuge from the turbulence of their previous lives; they wanted to bring up their children somewhere special and safe. But the island and the sea don’t care what people want, and when they claim a price from her family, Mara’s world unravels.

It takes the arrival of Pearl, mysterious and irresistible, to light a spark in Mara again, and allow her to consider a different story for herself.

The Gloaming is a gorgeous tale of love and grief, and the gap between fairy tales and real life.

Reviews

  • Prepare to enter a book of otherworldly tales and delights.

    Francesca Brown, Stylist

  • A gorgeous, atmospheric, magical love story.

    i

  • Kirsty Logan is very talented... Selkies and other creatures of fairytales are offered us side by side with a bored girl pulling pints in the island pub... Logan brings it off, daringly... a richly imagined and many-layered novel

    Allan Massie, The Scotsman

  • A gorgeous story and unlike anything else.

    The Sun

  • The lustrous, abandoned intensity of her prose is always a joy

    Claire Allfree, Daily Mail

More from this Author

About the Author

Kirsty Logan

Kirsty Logan is the author of the novels The Gracekeepers and The Gloaming, the short story collections A Portable Shelter and The Rental Heart & Other Fairytales, the flash fiction chapbook The Psychology of Animals Swallowed Alive, and the short memoir The Old Asylum in the Woods at the Edge of the Town Where I Grew Up. Her books have won the LAMBDA Literary Award, the Polari First Book Prize, the Saboteur Award, the Scott Prize and the Gavin Wallace Fellowship, and been selected for the Radio 2 Book Club and the Waterstones Book Club. In 2019 she was selected as one of the ten most outstanding LGBTQ British writers for the International Literature Showcase. Her short fiction and poetry has been translated into Japanese and Spanish, recorded for radio and podcasts, exhibited in galleries and distributed from a vintage Wurlitzer cigarette machine. She lives in Glasgow with her wife and their rescue dog.

Kirsty Logan

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