Book festival

When a festival is themed on ‘Blood’ it’s assumed that that it will be about crime, violence and horror.

While there are elements of that at Faclan: The Hebridean Book Festival at An Lanntair in Stornoway this year there’s also a large component on medicine and family: from Britain’s pre-eminent brain surgeon to one of the UK’s top Criminologists, Professor David Wilson, an expert on serial killers.

On Friday, with a discussion on the Brain and the Mind, island audiences will have privileged access to Britain’s pre-eminent neurosurgeon Henry Marsh CBE and top American psychologist Stephen Grosz.

Both have published best-selling career memoirs in Do No Harm: Stories of Life Death and Brain Surgery, and The Examined Life: How we Lose and Find Ourselves.

The event will be chaired by Dr Gavin Francis - himself an acclaimed author and practicing GP - whose book Adventures in Human Being was recently the Book of the Week on Radio 4. He will be the subject of a separate event on Saturday afternoon.

Included in a world class programme are events on The Shroud of Turin and the Birth of Christianity, Stornoway crime-writing sensation Malcolm Mackay and his Glasgow Trilogy, Helen Macdonald’s modern classic about coping with bereavement H is for Hawk and 13-year-old Jake McGowan Lowe whose book about his huge collection of animal bones Jake’s Bones, has been short-listed for the Royal Society’s Young Person’s Book of the Year.

Saturday morning is devoted to a celebration of sheep. The 1979 documentary The Shepherds of Berneray is followed by James Rebanks and his best seller The Shepherd’s Life about generations of sheep rearing in the Lake District, ending with a session on the history of sheep earmarks in Lewis and further afield.

Festival director Roddy Murray, said: “This really is an exceptional programme. You would have to travel very far to see a concentration of this calibre over three days and in such a superb setting.”

Brains and blood at book festival

27 October 2015