A leech, a pirate, a predator, an anti-Christ, a public benefactor and the fisherman's friend; such is Gillespie Strang in this remarkably powerful Scottish novel. Gillespie is the harsh prophet of the new breed of Scottish entrepreneur, prepared to use any means to achieve his insatiable ambition amongst the nineteenth-century fishing communities of the west coast. An elemental force, "dark, pernicious, impenetrable, without bowels of pity, immovable as granite", he brings advantage to some, death and inexorable doom to others, his family, and finally himself.
J. MacDougall Hay's classic novel is vast in scope, innovatory and even overpowering in its atmosphere of menace and brooding horror, but also touched with comedy, pathos and irony, as it relentlessly questions the nature of the universe and the source of evil.