The premise of Carys Davies’s latest book, Clear, caught me right away: an impoverished Scottish minister takes on the unenviable, but financially necessary, job of traveling to an isolated island in norther Scotland to evict its sole inhabitant. I had never heard of the Highland Clearances, which were the forced evictions of Scottish tenant farmers, many of whom had been on the land for generations, so that the landlords could make more money off the land. Clear takes place towards the end of this process, in the middle of the 1800s. I was really intrigued. And I admit that the cover helped, and the size of the book — something you can read in a few hours — didn’t hurt when I sat down to read it. But the beautiful storytelling, the amazing characters, and the powerful threads have me pretty sure this will be one of my books of the year.

The book begins when our minister, John, is reticently going to the island, leaving his wife for what he hopes will be a short time. But before he’s even had a chance to do a thing he falls down a cliff and is struck unconscious. The man he is there to evict — Ivar — finds him and helps nurse him back to health.

One of the stories threads is language. Ivar doesn’t speak English, and John doesn’t speak Ivar’s language, Norn, a language spoken for centuries on the Shetland Island but now lost in the aftermath of the Clearances. Slowly they come to know each other as Ivar helps John recover.

Another thread is loneliness and connection. Ivar has been alone on the island for years before John showed up. His father and brothers were all killed at sea, and his mother and any of his sisters (and any other relatives) who survived eventually left the island after seeing the writing on the wall. But Ivar stayed. For years he has been afraid of the day the collection agent arrives and finds Ivar cannot pay for the tenancy. He assumes that day arrived with John.

For his part, John is no fan of his job evicting Ivar, but he’s found ways to get around any moral or ethical qualms because he and his wife, Mary, desperately need the money — though Mary, for her part, never accepted that John needed to take this pathway.

It’s a wonderful moment when Mary, worried because her husband has been gone for far too long, goes to the island to fetch him or at least find out why he has gone missing.

Without spoiling things I’ll also just say here that I thought I knew where the novel was going to take me — though I was absolutely enjoying the way it was going about it (seriously, this is a wonderfully written book) — but I was surprised and intrigued by where Davies ultimately took me.

This is my first book by Davies, though I was already interested in reading her work after hearing great things about The Redemption of Galen Pike and West. Now I cannot wait to read more.