Hagstones, Muireann says part way through Sinéad Gleeson’s debut novel, aren’t just “battered stones with holes in them… they’re lucky”. Nell, to whom Muireann has presented the stone, collects them. “If you look through the hole,” Nell explains, “you’re meant to see a different view of the world.”
Like its namesake, Hagstone also offers a new perspective, one where the natural world is all powerful and art is of utmost importance. Our protagonist, Nell, is an artist whose work is often in conversation with natural phenomena – light, tides or the movement of waves on the sand. She lives off the west coast of Ireland on an isolated island whose inhabitants live alongside the supernatural. Its eeriest feature is “the sound”, the strange murmurings that the island emits at unpredictable moments, or, as Nell sees it, “the thrum that thwarted the place”. Not everybody hears “the sound” – and no one has ever worked out why.
