What Ends

Shortlisted for the Young Lions Fiction Award 2015

Set on a remote Scottish island, this is the compelling story of one family’s struggle to cope with a vanishing way of life

On Eilean Fìor, a small island off the north-west coast of Scotland with twenty-eight inhabitants, the McClouds run a faltering guesthouse. A family business, it is expected that one of the three children will eventually take over. But Barry, Flora and Trevor all have their own ideas.

In this nuanced and moving debut novel, Andrew Ladd weaves together a series of conjoined narratives which follow each of the McClouds as they struggle to find a balance between their feelings of obligation and their desire for personal freedom. At once a lyrically haunting and unforgettable elegy for a lost world, What Ends is also a subtle family saga about change and regret – about the difference between feeling one is trapped and the reality of being so.