Poor Angus - Robin Jenkins

Poor Angus centres round a struggling painter, Angus McAllister, who has returned to the seemingly idyllic Hebridean island of his birth in the hope that it will inspire him to create his masterpiece. His privacy is invaded by Janet, a visitor with relatives on the island, who has decided that an affair with an artist would be the simplest way to incense and recapture her husband, a golf-fanatic devoid of imagination.
So begins an irresistible story, both comic and serious which, with characteristic ironic wit explores the attitudes of men and women to sex and relationships in general, and which focuses on the psychology of the artist and the justification, if any, for art

Author of a number of landmark novels including The Cone Gatherers, The Changeling, Happy for the Child, The Thistle and the Grail and Guests of War, Jenkins is rapidly attaining recognition as one of Scotland's greatest writers. The themes of good and evil, of innocence lost, of fraudulence, cruelty and redemption shine through his work. His novels, shot through with ambiguity, are rarely about what they seem. He published his first book, So Gaily Sings the Lark, at the age of thirty-eight, and by the time of his death in 2005, over thirty of his novels were in print.

A blackly comic romp. Poor Angus is a remarkable novel. Its tone is even and wry, it is written with the lightest of touches and even when the some of the characters get savage retribution the reader can't help but smile.
The Sunday Times

Challenging and absorbing. . . [Jenkins] writes with a powerful and mordant irony
The Scotsman

An irresistible story, both comic and serious, by the multi-award winning veteran Scottish novelist.
Books Magazine

Take a painter, his ravishing muse, a remote Scottish island and a sprinkling of magic and you have the main components of the brilliant new novel . . . Poor Angus is a strange, wonderful love story [and] Jenkins a remarkable writer whose gentlest touch induces the greatest of pleasures.
The Times