The Leaper

Seems Macdonald is an outsider, not only because he lives on an isolated primitive croft, but also because, being the only child in the school to speak Gaelic (apart from his disturbed sister), he is the favourite of MacCallum the headmaster, which leads to the boy being bullied in the playground. MacCallum comes in his boat for ceilidhs with the Macdonald family, to preserve the evocative Gaelic names of birds and fl owners, and to teach Seumas to read and write what the headmaster calls `the language of Eden' which, like the natural world, is under threat. The Leaper chronicles Sumac's late and troubled introduction to sex; revealing how he fi ads consolation, companionship and hope in the company of a wild creature, in the face of violence and discrimination from the community. The novel is also about the loss of the old oral Gaelic tradition and the emergence of a new form of Gaelic culture, literate, but lacking the continuity of the old spoken tales.