What My Father Made

Some houses keep their secrets in the walls. Fergus Muir has kept his in a notebook.Seventeen-year-old Fergus has spent his entire life in an immaculate Edinburgh flat, overlooking the Meadows. He knows the correct cloth for every surface. He knows which mop head is for which floor. He knows, without being told, that the order of the cleaning matters - that you always work from the highest point to the lowest, because what you dislodge from above must have somewhere clean to go.He has applied this principle to other areas of his life.Raised by his father Alistair - methodical, warm, genuinely skilled at the running of a household - Fergus has been shaped into something precise and useful: a boy who doesn’t flinch, who maintains surfaces, who understands that thoroughness is a virtue and speed without thoroughness is a vice. He is, by every visible measure, reliable. Quiet. Adequate to his situation.He has been adequate to his situation for seventeen years.Then Eilidh Brennan moves in across the stair. She arrives from Glasgow with a curtain rail that won’t cooperate and a directness that doesn’t perform itself - someone who says things because they’re true, who asks questions and waits for the real answer, who laughs at something in the hallway before she’s even knocked on the door. In a life built around managed surfaces and calibrated responses, Eilidh is the first person Fergus has encountered who simply is who she is. She is also the first person who looks at him and waits for him to be someone too.As Edinburgh’s Meadows yield one missing person after another and a patient detective tightens his net around the neighbourhood, Fergus finds himself navigating two lives pulling apart at the seams: the life he performs inside the flat, and the life quietly becoming his own. On the unlocked rooftop above the stair, across a mismatched kitchen table, in the haar rolling in off the Forth, he is building something he has never been allowed to build - a vocabulary for what he actually feels, and the slow, terrifying courage to say it out loud.Because Fergus does know. He has always known. The Sunday cleaning is not only cleaning. The bag in the boot of the car is not only a bag. The silence that falls over the flat during certain weeks is not only silence. He has been managing this knowledge since he was eight years old, and the question Eilidh’s presence makes harder and harder to keep not-asking is whether adequacy is still enough - and whether the skills he has been given can be pointed in a different direction.A gripping Scottish psychological thriller and coming-of-age literary novel, The Highest Point is a story about what it costs to grow up inside a family secret too dangerous to name. Perfect for readers of dark domestic fiction, Scottish crime fiction, and literary noir, and for fans of Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain, Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project, and Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon.The highest point is where you begin. What you dislodge from there must have somewhere clean to go.