Kidnap

A century ago, the Orkney poet George Mackay Brown was settling into his first term at Stromness Academy. His schooldays were to prove a dismal grind, but English lessons brought moments of magic. He was especially intrigued by poems – ballads, mostly – signed simply ‘Anon’. The name of the poet was lost – and perhaps there hadn’t been just one but a host of craftsmen in the making of each of these wonders. They were the creation of a tribe, the inheritance of a community, songs ‘seraphically free/ Of taint of personality’. Today, as publishers bust themselves to promote the cult of individual authors, it’s a thrilling, liberating notion.

Sexual fantasies, that dream you had last night, and ideas for novels have one thing in common: generally the best place for them is inside your head, never to be divulged. Until now, the major exception to the rule was Nancy Friday’s 1973 compilation of women’s fantasies, My Secret Garden, which sold more than two million copies worldwide. Friday aimed to emancipate women from guilt and inhibition, and informed an enthralled world that women of all stripes were prone to vivid erotic reverie. Many of the more heavily thumbed passages involved taboo elements, such as rape, incest and the occasional dog or octopus. Of course this was some decades before

Until now, Colin Barrett has made his name as an artist of the short story. Both his debut collection, Young Skins (2014) and Homesickness (2022) won him acclaim for their depiction of rural Ireland. But his tales stretch beyond the constraints of their size, and his dispossessed drinkers, small-time crooks and depressed teenagers seem too large and real to have their stories end in a matter of pages. Barrett’s first novel, Wild Houses, is, then, a delight, with a wider space for his talent to spread and for his acutely observed characters to linger. In the first few pages he gives us a man whose tattoos appear like ‘the pages