It is August 1893. Alexander Auchmuty Kininmonth, optimistic railway engineer, works on the construction of a railway line between Garve and Lochinver, expecting that the railway will both transform the economy of that lonely corner of Scotland and bring him riches and personal comfort. Over the course of time, however, he finds that his dreams are slowly and inexorably sacrificed to the aspirations of others, and to events into which he finds himself stumbling head-first. Eventually, the fiscal incompetence of the railway company drives Kininmonth to seek employment in the Scottish borders, where he becomes involved in a bizarre relationship with two survivors of a community abandoned on a sub-Antarctic island. Extraordinary events necessitate a rapid escape by all three to the remote island of Jura, before Kininmonth returns to the north-west, where work continues on the railway. He is caught up in a 'revolution' in Ullapool in 1897, where a 'Citadel of the Elect' has been founded by a millenarian preacher.
Historical events - factual or fictional - threaten to obliterate his schemes, but Kininmonth refuses to bow to the inevitable, always hoping, as the worst of scenarios persistently unfold before him, that everything will turn out for the best. And indeed his railway is finally completed - or is it? This is an astonishingly assured first novel. Written with great realism and sense of time and place, Andy Drummond creates a haunting and hallucinatory world where nothing is as it seems and in which the utopian dreams of its hero and his age are seen as the delusions they came to be.