The Loch of the Bees
- Author: Donald S. Murray (Scotland)
- Book type: Scottish novel, historical novel
- Publisher: Saraban
- To be released: March 12, 2026
- Length: 288 pages
- Format: paperback / ebook
- Prize: £ 10.99
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Donald S. Murray The Loch of the Bees reviews
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Blurb of the Donald S. Murray novel about the Hebrides
This evocative and deeply original work reimagines the lives of Hebrideans across the centuries, sweeping from the eighth century to the present day. Through interlinked stories layered like blankets of peat, the novel reveals how fragments of earlier lives – a sword hidden by a Viking raider, a rosary left behind by a troubled priest – are preserved, buried, and later resurface.
As the novel unfolds, past loves, betrayals, struggles and losses echo through the lives of modern islanders, shaped by the shadows of the Clearances and devastating wars. Again and again, characters are drawn back to a beehive-shaped stone shelter on a tiny island at the edge of the Loch of the Bees, a place of refuge, memory and quiet renewal.
Donald S. Murray was born in 1956. He is a Scottish writer and poet and is an Honorary Fellow of the Association for Scottish Literature who has won the Society of Authors’ Paul Torday Memorial Prize (2012, for As the Women Lay Dreaming,) and the Callum Macdonald Memorial Award (2021), among many awards for his historical fiction, creative non-fiction and poems. His critically acclaimed books bring to life the culture and nature of the Scottish islands, and he appears regularly on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio Scotland and as a live performer.