When the preserved body of a woman is found in a peat bog in the Cabrach, Aberdeenshire, it causes a stir in the isolated Scottish community. Some of them believe her uncovering might be the work of the devil.
Gabrielle Griffiths’s atmospheric debut opens in May 1915. Lizzie, the wife of wealthy landowner William Calder, discovers the corpse while foraging for moss. Her husband has recently left for the first world war and Lizzie resolves to discover the woman’s identity and cause of death. She enlists the help of Johnny, an itinerant farmhand and talented singer. Johnny and Lizzie both harbour secrets from the past and this draws them together.
The novel is narrated alternately from Johnny and Lizzie’s perspectives and tracks back in time to 1905. We learn of Lizzie’s disappointed love affair with a childhood friend and how she ended up with her cold, controlling husband, and discover why Johnny changed his name and is on the run from his past. What begins as a rural mystery (Where is the bog woman from? Was she murdered? How did she end up buried in peat?) becomes, instead, an affecting love story.
Griffiths grew up in Aberdeenshire and her use of the vernacular vividly conveys the period and a God-fearing, closed community, used to hardship and quick to judge outsiders. She writes well about forbidden desire, guilt and shame, and the seasonal rhythms of a rural community on the eve of radical change. Her description of the ploughmen’s brutal initiation ceremony involving the sharing of the “Horseman’s Word” is hard to shake. Lizzie and Johnny may be flawed, but Griffiths has us rooting for them and her unsentimental ending is particularly fitting given the devastation the war will unleash.
Greater Sins by Gabrielle Griffiths is published by Doubleday (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
