Hammond Innes · 1962 · survival
Hammond Innes's 1962 novel, set on a lightly renamed St Kilda. The army is closing a missile tracking station on Laerg, sixty miles out into the Atlantic beyond the Outer Hebrides, and the evacuation is left too late in the season. A painter goes out to find the brother he was told drowned in the war, and finds him running the operation under another man's name.
- 1London
In a London garret, the painter Donald Ross is told by a stranger that the brother he believed lost at sea in 1944 is alive - and living under the stolen identity of a man who stands to inherit a fortune.
- 2Glasgow
He works north to the ports where the army runs its Hebridean supply line, and talks his way onto the operation closing the range - an end-of-season evacuation being pushed later than anyone is comfortable with.
- 3Benbecula
From the base in the Outer Hebrides the landing craft go out west, and the weather charts start to look worse each day - and the officer in charge of the Laerg detachment turns out to be the brother he came to find.
- 4Laerg
On Laerg, a black rock of unclimbable cliffs whose last islanders were taken off in the thirties, the storm catches the evacuation half-finished - and Iain will not leave, because there is something on the cliffs he wants.