Haud Fast - Matthew Davis

About the book

Scotland, 1689. Coll MacLeod walks away from the Battle of Killiecrankie with his life and nothing else. His brother is dead. His cause is lost. The hills of Perthshire offer no comfort and no direction, only the silence where Euan's voice used to be.

A stranger appears on a winter road with an offer: seven years of provision in exchange for seven years without washing, without prayer, without the trappings of a man. Coll agrees. Not with hope. With indifference. He has stopped believing he deserves better.

The seven years that follow are darkness: a man becoming something between human and animal, wandering a starving land, visited by a devil whose arguments grow quieter and more reasonable with every passing season. The hardest thing about the voice that tells you to stop is how much sense it makes.

Then a desperate old man, and his daughter who looks at Coll and does not look away. Hope.

Haud Fast is a novel about guilt, endurance, and the thin, stubborn thread that keeps a person alive when everything else has gone. It asks what it costs to hold on, and what becomes possible when you do.

Drawn from Bearskin by the Brothers Grimm

The author

Matthew
Davis

Matthew Davis lives in Fife, just outside St Andrews, and holds a PhD in Scottish history. He spends as much time as he can in the Highlands, walking the same hills his characters walk, in weather that doesn't forgive inattention.

The Brothers Grimm have been part of his life since childhood. What drew him to them then, and still draws him now, is their refusal to make things easy. Fairy tales, at their truest, are not stories about happiness. They are stories about endurance, not the triumphant kind, but the kind that simply refuses to stop. Bearskin, the tale of a soldier who strikes a devil's bargain and endures seven years of degradation through sheer stubbornness, has been his favourite since he first read it.

He runs ultra marathons. The distances are long enough, and the hours solitary enough, that you get to know the voice that tells you to stop. You learn it is not always right. You learn that continuing, when every reasonable argument says otherwise, is its own kind of answer.

That voice, and the men who hear it but have no language to answer it, is at the heart of Haud Fast. Male grief and loneliness, the particular silence that surrounds suffering when there is no language given for it: these are not abstract concerns. They are personal ones.

For anyone dragging across the bottom. Haud Fast.

HaudFast

MatthewDavis

Follow the journey

Haud
Fast

Matthew
Davis