Just as there’s always a view of water in Orkney, there’s always a reminder of its neolithic past, and I would come to explore the islands’ history more deeply when I was researching my latest novel, The Killing Stones. Over time, we explored some of the smaller islands: Hoy with its dramatic cliffs, the tiny island of Papa Westray, home to the Knap of Howar, the oldest domestic stone dwelling in Northern Europe, and North Ronaldsay, where we stayed in the Bird Observatory’s accommodation, a reminder of the work that first took me north. double quotation mark I felt a longing to go north again in my fiction, a kind of homesickness for the islands, for the dark winters and the bright, light summers