This is a quote from a reader´s e-mail:  “In fact, you have two main characters. One is Eks but the other is the Highland Clearance itself.”  It never occurred to me that an event could be a character; but I see exactly what the reader means.

When Eks discovers a new facet of the Clearances, she discusses it with Danny, for example, and the Clearances are constantly referred to, constantly in the background; and then they become The New Clearances. . . the “character” who provides most of the conflict in the story.

The reader makes a point of being “not a Brit” and asks an oblique question: “Because the event is tragic, its history has a ´bad smell`, and it is not well known even to scholars, I presume.” He adds in brackets: (“Oh, no! How could the English do such a thing? Such nice, educated people?”) The point is made in the book: the Clearances were not made directly by “the English.” Many of the absentee landowners were Scots — clan chiefs, some of them, whose loyalty to the clan was destroyed in the brutal aftermath of Culloden. That, of course, seems to be a different event in history, but it`s not. If the clan system had still existed, the Clearances would not have happened.

Anyone who disagrees — I welcome debate! I still might write Eks´s book ´Shame on the Nation.¨