Hovel - by Ailsa Ross (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A CBC and Globe and Mail Spring Book Pick

In this debut novel, a young woman in the Rocky Mountains, separated from the ancestral rhythms of her home in Scotland, turns to ancient rituals to find solace and connection. With shades of Olga Tokarczuk, Ali Smith, and Rachel Cusk, Hovel is a book for those fascinated by female interiority.

Homesickness takes many forms. Alone in the mountains because of her husband's job, occupied by little more than online video captioning she calls "kitten work," our narrator becomes fascinated by the not-long-gone life of her Scottish ancestors, a time when the lamplighter took the night off for the full moon, girls bathed their faces in morning dew, and people sang to the seals.

Her husband, however, is unsure of the emotional efficacy of cooking by candlelight, peeing in the woods, and writing vexed letters to the mayor about the birds living in the doomed aspens behind their apartment building. Especially because the letters are being read, out loud, at the town meetings attended by unimpressed neighbours. But our narrator is bewitched by the liminality of memory.

In a novel of compelling poetic precision and depth, Ross captures the lengths we go to for connection when we're alone, following threads of personal history and fascination to conclusions one can only reach when there's too much time on one's hands and it's too cold to go outside.

Review Quotes

"[A] moody, poetic first novel (speckled through with equally moody photographs) about a homesick Scottish woman living in the Rocky Mountains whose growing fixation on ancestral rituals and memory unsettles her marriage and alienates her from the surrounding community."
--Globe and Mail

"A truly refreshing novel, both in form and authorial voice."
--Cora, Flying Books

"A brilliant exploration of interiority: of the mind, the home, family history. A wild, cozy unspooling of what it means to create connection when faced with isolation. This is the kind of book that warrants multiple re-reads. Read if you like Olga Tokarczuk, Kate Zambreno, Ali Smith."
--df, Iron Dog Books

"Both earthly and otherworldly, full of hard and soft edges. Hovel is a book of blunt truths, close looking, and great feeling."
--Amina Cain, author of A Horse at Night: On Writing

"Hovel does not describe a neat journey of coming to love a place one hates, or lessons learned from the ancients to alleviate our modern ills. It's about how our fantasies reveal our limits. It imagines how things could be different not only if we existed in an alternative time and place, but if we were bold enough to live in accordance with what we find beautiful, real, and true."
--Helena Duncan, Kismet

"This book will stay with me for the longest time. Perhaps I'll pass it on to my descendants. Yes, perhaps this book will help someone in the future understand what true connection is. . . . There's a stamina, a subtleness, a poetic beauty and a great sense of timing at play here. . . . All in all, I just loved Hovel."
--Dorthe Nors, author of A Line in the World

About the Author

AILSA ROSS writes about people, place, and art for Outside, Orion, the Guardian, the BBC, and others. She grew up in the north of Scotland and lives in the Canadian Badlands. This is her first novel.