Her boyfriend is dead on the kitchen floor. Morvern Callar’s silence is not innocence, and it is not grief either.
It is off-season in a remote Highland sea port. Twenty-one-year-old Morvern Callar, a low-paid employee in the local supermarket, wakes one morning to find that her strange boyfriend has committed suicide and is dead on their kitchen floor.
Rather than break down, Morvern acts with a calm that is more disturbing than panic. She goes on moving through the ordinary world of supermarket shifts, drink, sex, money and small-town routines, while the fact of death remains hidden at the centre of everything.
Alan Warner’s debut is a modern Scottish literary novel unlike any conventional story of grief. Morvern is not offered as a puzzle to be solved or a victim to be explained. She is watchful, secretive, physical and hard to judge, making her way through a world where shock and freedom can feel dangerously close.
Brutal, strange and darkly funny, Morvern Callar captures the dead-end atmosphere of a remote Highland port and the fierce privacy of a young woman who refuses to be understood on anyone else’s terms.
WINNER OF THE SOMERSET MAUGHAM AWARD
