For his third novel, Douglas Stuart moves north from the Glasgow tenements of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo to the island of Harris in the Outer Hebrides. John-Callum, known as Cal, returns to his family croft after spending four years at a mainland textile college, following a call from his father, John, to tell him that his grandmother is dying.

John is the precentor of his local church, a congregation of Free Presbyterians, who adhere to an extreme biblical morality. The 26 remaining members attend four services each Sabbath and believe that fathers have authority over children and husbands over wives, since women ‘rarely know what is best for themselves’. Stuart treats this faith, which will be inimical to the majority of his readers, with great respect.

The heart of the novel is Cal’s relationship with his father – as intimate as the hyphen in his name. While at college, he prayed with him during long-distance phone calls. He craves the security of home, where John treats him with both appalling violence, punching him so hard that his face requires 12 stitches, and deep tenderness, rubbing ointment into his hands after working at the loom.

John regards Cal as an extension of himself; yet the one thing he refuses to countenance is that they might share a sexuality.  Cal, who has enjoyed some student flings, seeks to rekindle a furtive relationship with a boyhood friend. John, meanwhile, has been in love with his neighbour, Innes, since he was 14. His wife’s discovery of their affair led to her leaving him and, ultimately, moving in with his brother.

In this beautifully observed novel, Stuart portrays lives as materially poor as those in his previous work but of a far greater spiritual and emotional richness. The language is as spare as the Hebridean landscape, enriched with metaphorical flourishes – such as the island girls who ‘didn’t know how to wear heels and had the high trotting gait of Eriskay ponies’.

Where the novel falters is in the credibility of John’s character. As well as his affair with Innes, he has sex with a fellow precentor on the far side of the island. The issue is not simply one of hypocrisy – although John patently neglects to remove the beam from his own eye before pointing out the speck in his neighbour’s – but plausibility. How could a man believing in such an unforgiving Calvinistic code be so indifferent to the prospect of his eternal damnation?