The Counting Window

About this book

Thirty-four years after a solar storm burned out the world's power, the Highland town of Pitlochry still has four hours of electric light each evening, thanks to an old hydro dam and the stubbornness of Fergus Rattray. His granddaughter Isla, the Glen's midwife and five months pregnant, has learned his two sacred jobs: counting the salmon through the fish ladder's viewing window, and keeping the Register of every birth, death and bloodline. Then sixty-one hungry strangers walk up the A9 to the Tummel bridge, led by a woman who stood on that same bridge as a child, the winter the town turned her family away. The Moot must vote again, and Isla holds the deciding seat. Her grandfather offers her the story of that first vote, written in his own hand. But the numbers in his ledgers do not agree with his pages, and the woman on the bridge remembers a man with a lamp.