#BlogTour-‘The Seagull’s Laughter’ by Holly Bidgood

About the book…

1973. Malik has always been something of a misfit. Born to a Greenlandic mother and an English-Explorer father, he has one eye of black and one of watery-blue. As a child his mother’s people refused to touch him and now his own baby daughter’s family feel the same way.

Never having known his father and with his mother and uncle dead from alcoholism, Malik’s only companion is a guiding spirit no-one else can see.

One day a white man with a nose like a beak and a shadow like a seagull appears on his doorstep and invites him to England.

Martha has had enough, living with domestic abuse and expected to turn the other cheek for the sake of appearances. She compares bruises with her friend Neil, who regularly suffers homophobic attacks. With Martha’s baby, they go on the run to Shetland, where Martha has happy childhood memories of summers spent with her aunt.

On their way up north in a camper van, they come across a dejected Malik, alone again after a brief reconciliation with his father’s family.
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The three of them find peace and safety in the Shetland Isles, but Malik still needs answers to the identity of the beak-nosed man who casts a shadow over his life.

The Seagull’s Laughter is an immersive read, intertwined with the nature and magic of Greenlandic folk tales. It will be published by Wildpressed Books on the 27th November in paperback. My thanks to Kelly from Love Books Group Tours for the invite and my gifted paperback copy for review!

Holly Bidgood is a natural born storyteller. She pulls you into her tale from the very first page as she sets the scene with Malik, in Iceland, the year is 1974 and he is looking for where he belongs.

With an inate sense of style and pace, the reader is aware of how cutlrually Malik is outcast-the proof of this is in his different coloured eyes, his English father and Greenlandic mother creating a person straddling both worlds yet belonging to neither. He begins the book approaching explorer Snorri in an attempt to find out more about his father, Rasmus. Having had a child with an Icelandic woman, who will not marry him, he needs to find out from people like Snorri where he came from so not only can Malik make his peace with who he really is, he can also establish himself as a father to his daughter.

Immediately you are pulled into caring about who malik is and where his journey will take him-it appears to be a tale of what Welsh refer to as ‘belonging’. Deeper than merely being blood related, it implies a sense of commnality that transcends lineage.

Deeply entrenched in the cultural traditions of Greenland, this has the feel of an old tale made new, as Malik goes about establishing who he belongs to and who is the man at the heart of this mystery-just who is the beak nosed man who arrives and sets this all in motion? Bringing with him the news of Malik’s father’s passing, he takes him to England where he meets Martha and Neil, themselves on the run from other people’s behaviour which has made their lives hell.

It is a book about putting down roots as well as the freedom of being rootless, being aware of where you have come from so that you can move forward to the future unencumbered by the chains of the past.

Holly weaves a deeply spiritual tale which feels like it should be read aloud around a camp fire, it is a tremdous read full of elemental power, delivered in a heartfelt narrative that sweeps you away. with its magical energy.

About the author…

Holly is 24 years old. She moved to Hull after graduating from UCL with a degree in Scandinavian languages. She has been writing since a very young age and as well as her novel, she regularly writes folk and fairytale-like short stories

Holly considers landscape, wilderness and interaction with the elements to be the driving force behind her writing, a passion which has taken her to Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands.

Conceived during a visit to the Faroe Islands, her debut literary novel looks at friendship, loss and social change. It is set in the bleak wilderness of those islands during the second world war and is available from Wild Pressed Books, and is called ‘The Eagle And The Oystercatcher’.

Holly studied Icelandic, Norwegian and Old Norse at University College London. She also studied as an exchange student at The University of Iceland (Háskóli Íslands) and spent a memorable summer working in a museum in South Greenland.

She decided to start a family young, and now has three small children. Holly helps run Life & Loom, a social and therapeutic weaving studio in Hull.  She likes to escape from the busy-ness of her life by working on her novels and knitting Icelandic wool jumpers.

Links-https://www.facebook.com/HollyBidgoodAuthor/

Twitter @HollyBidgood

Twitter @Wildpressed and Instagram @wildpressedbooks