Lost People
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Lost People
Buy Now for £9.42
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Narrated by:
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Ruth Urquhart
About this listen
A new short novel from one of Scotland’s renowned writers.
In a fractured dystopic future, the child Rue finds solace in the garden of a mysterious community. Rue has lost identity, family, home and people to war. Too much has happened for Rue to trust others, but connection with the rest of the living world is not lost. Adulthood requires a courageous journey through a landscape of despair, yet ultimately Rue finds hope of regeneration from unexpected sources.
Margaret Elphinstone is a distinguished author with eight novels, poetry, and short stories to her credit. A graduate of Durham University and Emeritus Professor of Strathclyde University, her The Sea Road, published in 2000, received a Scottish Arts Council Award and earned a place in The List magazine’s 100 Best Scottish Books of All Time.
©2024 Margaret Elphinstone (P)2025 Wild Goose PublicationsCritic reviews
Shortlisted for Scotland’s National Book Awards 2024
Great story, beautifully told
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One of my favourite books
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Listener received this title free
An abandoned, semi feral and fearful child seeking, warmth and shelter: our introduction to Rue, in surroundings suggestive of a monastery. Kindly and perceptive adults help Rue to fashion a niche within the community, centred on a love of plants and their cultivation. An affinity with animals becomes evident, in the cat and dogs which become close companions.
There is a growing awareness that this enclosed world, devoid of modernity, is a means of survival in a world devastated by….War ? Environmental collapse ? Rue must travel beyond the gates, finding a landscape largely deserted, dwellings abruptly abandoned, nature taking over. Subsisting by the exchange of manual skill with crops and animals, for food and shelter, Rue journeys far and wide, returning finally at a point of greater hope and understanding, to the monastery and the beautiful Knot garden which had been his/her creation.
Herbs, flowers, plants of all kinds are lovingly named and enumerated, their uses celebrated. Most of humanity is now living at a subsistence level, ever ready to move on when lurking violence threatens. In this world Rue can enjoy a valued rôle, in which distinguishing traits of literalness, social anxiety, and a need for ‘pattern’ become strengths.
This is a lucid, beautifully written, compact novel, which speaks to the essential goodness of people, their resilience in the face of threat and disaster, and the innate power of nature to revive and heal. The world it depicts is both strange and eerily familiar. Its atmosphere lingers long after one reads the final page.
To narrate a story in the first person, I think it is vital that the voice is authentic to the character. Ruth Urquhart achieves this through plainly stating thoughts and feelings, conveying confusion at the things which do not make sense, exuding the warmth with which the dogs, Cosette and Jo are described,and the pleasure in knowledge of plant names and uses.
Other voices, other accents, are woven in seamlessly and unobtrusively.
Hauntingly beautiful
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