Bridal Path

Ewan McEwan is a widowed crofter on Eorsa, a small island in the Inner Hebrides, where he tends his children, his cows and his goat with uncomplicated competence. His neighbours decide that the household plainly requires a wife, but nearly every eligible woman on the island is related to him. Accepting the practical logic of the problem, Ewan travels to the Scottish mainland, which he imagines as a place of innumerable women and straightforward possibilities.

His apparently simple search becomes a comic odyssey through a society whose assumptions are very different from his own. Encounters with poachers, policemen and a succession of prospective brides draw him into misunderstandings and adventures for which island common sense offers no easy answer. Beneath the humour, the novel contrasts close-knit Hebridean life with the freedoms and complications of the mainland, while Ewan gradually discovers that choosing a companion cannot be managed as neatly as arranging livestock, fishing or crops.