The story behind

Novelist and broadcaster John MacKay shares the inspiration behind his sweeping family saga, Home

There’s no place like home.

We all know the phrase and most of us recognise a truth in it.

But where is home? The house you live in now? The house in which you grew up? Where your heart is?

What about a place with family ties stretching back more than 250 years? A place where you can see the marks left by the generations of family who came before? Where you are immersed in the landscape and infl uences that shaped them and ultimately you?

That’s an experience denied to most because of the great population shifts of the last two centuries. I was lucky.

My parents always referred to the Isle of Lewis as ‘home’, even though I was born and raised in Glasgow. Every summer I would return to my grandmother’s house on the west side of the island and play among the ruins of old blackhouses. I knew it was a different place, but it was only as I got older that I understood and appreciated how unique it was. The blackhouse in which I was playing had been built by my great-great grandfather in the optimism of land tenure fi nally being secured for crofters. At the same time, I was absorbing stories about the lives and adventures of these earlier generations. That kindled an interest in genealogy which, as those who’ve explored it will know too well, became something of a mission, even obsession, to track down every last detail.

And as the stories emerged, the loves and losses, the triumphs and tragedies, I was struck by how the waves of a tumultuous century washed over even the most remote communities. It struck me, too, how history is so often told through the great names and the grand houses, but it was lived by the common people and their communities.

The house in which my mother was born, in Carloway in Lewis, was one such home. Within a few years of it being built it had lost a son to war, another to the Spanish Flu and a daughter to emigration.

It was a repeating pattern through the century; answering the nation’s call when summoned or forced to leave out of economic necessity. All against a background of the people’s struggle to live their lives in a place the world was leaving behind.

It inspired me to tell the story of a house through the experiences of those who had lived there during the last century.

That is Home. It is not my own family history, but it is informed by it. I see it as the story of families across Scotland and I hope people will make their own connections.

And the house that inspired Home?

I still visit my aunt there every year.

After all, despite the various fl ats and houses I’ve lived in through the years, it is still the one defi nable place that will always be home. S

LEFT TO RIGHT: John MacKay; the croft on the Isle of Lewis that inspired the book

John MacKay’s novel, Home, is available to buy through Luath Press Ltd, £9.99, luath.co.uk