Blessed Assurance

Stewart Ennis's debut novel hovers constantly between comedy and tragedy. Small-town Scotland is seen in perceptive detail through the eyes of an eleven-year-old boy. Characters, like his fundamentalist Gran, like the unforgettable itinerant preacher, Benjamin Mutch, leap into our heads and take us over. Steeped in matters of faith and rejection the book offers a rare and fascinating glimpse into a past world which makes you turn the pages in a quest for answers. - Bernard MacLaverty; This, in a nuanced and theological sense, is a sectarian novel that manages to make life within a scripture-centred household appealing rather than appalling as stereotype would so often have it. We meet characters Mark Twain or Flannery O'Connor would have been proud to have begotten. ... Blessed Assurance's antecedents include The House with the Green Shutters, Gillespie and Docherty. More recent sources for comparison would be the work of Jeanette Winterson, James Robertson and the poet Iain Bamforth. The earnest, scab-scouring schoolboy dreamer and precocious would-be missionary, Joseph Kirkland, takes his well earned place amongst the many youthful savants and seers populating the coming-of-age stories that predominate in Caledonian letters. - Donny O'Rourke