Degrees of Illusion (ePub)

'Scott is a clever and accomplished writer who turns his hand neatly to fiction.' The West Highland Free Press

'The author's writing abilities remain unerringly intact ... Mr Scott has style to spare' John MacLeay, The Scots Magazine

'...the work of the born raconteur...' Alan Taylor, Scottish Review of Books

(Reviews of some of the author's other works.)

A car accident, two mysterious deaths - similar yet separated by a century - take Niall Fraser to the far north on a quest for answers...and ultimately to revelations more devastating that he could ever have imagined. Escaping to a new life by returning to a remote northern community he once visited in his youth, he hopes to unlock a secret from his past. He arrives in Greenland at the beginning of winter – the 'long night', a time of dangerous susceptibility to the northern madness of Cabin Fever – with all his worldly possessions and an obsession with an Arctic explorer who died under strange circumstances a century earlier; and whose life becomes increasingly intertwined with his own. As he pursues his quests he falls for a woman who becomes another enigma he has to solve, along with the death of a young woman and a plot which threatens the survival of the community.
Greenland is a country which has never had political leaders and never known war but is in a state of rapid change. Woven around true events and set against a background of conflicts – unresolved trauma, clashes of cultures, traditional versus modern, rising political activism, exploitation and anachronistic colonialism – this is a book about the arrogance of belief that indigenous knowledge is worthless unless backed by science, that having power is justification for using it, that the Arctic is a wasteland inhabited by an inferior people.
It is a book about love, unrequited fatherhood and rites of passage for those who dare to embrace the unknown.