The Cleared Island
$5.99 · eBook · instant download
“Some places aren’t empty. They were emptied.”
Kirsty is the one they come to now. Two years a solicitor and the youngest keeper of a count that began before she was born, she takes her first case alone: Eilean Fàire, a Hebridean island famously and ‘voluntarily’ abandoned by its last families in 1953 — a poignant end-of-an-era story retold on every heritage board since. But an old woman born on that island was told, as a child, never to speak of the west end.
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What you are getting
How it begins
Flora Cameron stood at the march dyke on the morning the island became famous for leaving, and watched, from a mile away, across the shoulder of the hill the island was named for, the most beautiful lie she would ever see.
The east end was full of boats. There had not been so many boats at the township jetty in her four years on the island — the ferry from Oban dressed with bunting, and the newspapermen’s launch, and a drifter lent by a cousin in Tobermory, and, standing off in the sound with its engine idling, a boat carrying a man with a cine camera, because the leaving of Eilean Fàire had been announced in the papers for a month, and the country had decided, in the way a country decides these things, that it was a story: the last families of a proud small island, going with dignity, by their own choice, to the mainland and the future, and the island given back to the birds.
Is this your kind of book?
The Cleared Island is literary mystery — places that were emptied — and the people erased with them. It is written for readers who want the patient kind of crime and suspense: plotted, unhurried, and more interested in what people conceal than in how loudly it ends.
This is Book Three of The Unmapped. Each book closes its own case, so it can be read on its own — but the series is built to be read in order, and starting at The Unmapped means the connections land the way they were written.
The The Unmapped in order
- The Unmappedfree
- The Drowned Glen$5.99
- The Cleared Island$5.99 · you are here
Why buy it here
Buying from this page gets you both formats in one purchase — the EPUB for your e-reader or phone, and the PDF for everything else. There is no DRM on either file, so the book is genuinely yours: move it between devices, keep a backup, read it in ten years on something that has not been invented yet.
The download link arrives the moment the payment clears, and it is tied to the email you paid with — so if you lose the file, the link can be re-issued to that same address. And buying direct means the money goes to the person who wrote the book rather than a retailer’s cut.
