#BookReview: The Book of I by David Greig

The Book of I by David Greig
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook (as Columba's Bones)
Genres: historical fiction, Scottish history
Series: Darkland Tales #4
Pages: 160
Published by Europa Editions on September 9, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A brilliant Scottish debut, shortlisted for the Highland Book Prize and the Bookmark Book Festival Book of the Year.

825: In the aftermath of a vicious attack by raiders from the north, an unlikely trio finds themselves the lone survivors on a remote Scottish isle. Still breathing are young Brother Martin, the only resident of the local monastery to escape martyrdom; Una, a beekeeper and mead maker who has been relieved of her violent husband during the slaughter; and Grimur, an aging Norseman who claws his way out of the hasty grave his fellow raiders left him in, thinking him dead.

As the seasons pass in this wild and lonely setting, their inherent distrust of each other melts into a complex meditation on the distances and bonds between them. Told with humor and alive with sharply exquisite dialogue, David Greig deftly lifts the curtain between our world and the past. The Book of I is an entirely unique novel that serves as a philosophical commentary on guilt and redemption, but also humanity, love, and the things we choose to believe in.

My Review:

I picked this up because, frankly, my curiosity bump itched. It’s the title that got me. I read the “I” in the title as the first-person singular, and couldn’t figure out how THAT related to the information in the blurb.

Because the story in the blurb sounded fascinating, and different from what I usually pick up. Also, it’s just plain rare for a work of historical fiction to NOT have pretensions of being a doorstop. A 160 page historical novel? Sign me up! (So I did – and there’s that “I” again)

The “I” isn’t me. Well, I knew that. I mean the “I” of the title isn’t the first person singular pronoun. I, pronounced [ee] according to the quotation from The Scottish Islands by Hamish Haswell-Smith that serves as both an epigram and the prologue for the book, was an early name for the island in the Inner Hebrides, off the Ross of Mull on the western coast of Scotland, now known as Iona.

(When this book was originally published in the United Kingdom in 2023, the title was Columba’s Bones, after the historical saint who founded the monastery and whose bones are literally the bones of contention in the story. I’m not sure whether the title change for the US publication was the correct choice or not, but I probably wouldn’t have picked it up if it hadn’t happened.)

Still, in 825, when this story takes place, the island was called I, and it’s a beautiful little bit of paradise on the right day for the right people, or at least it is in the story and I expect it might still be now, as well.

The day this story begins, however, is not remotely paradisiacal. The island is small, the population was equally so, and the first time we see this remote little place in 825 it’s from the perspective of a Viking raider who is about to do what Viking raiders are still famous for doing.

Grimur and his fellow Vikings in Helgi Cleanshirt’s boat plan to raid, and raze, the tiny village, take the women and children as slaves, and, most importantly from Helgi’s egotistical perspective, steal the rumored treasure from the tiny monastery and put the fear of, well, Helgi into the people he leaves behind so deeply that when he comes back – and he will – they’ll bring whatever treasure they have down to his boat on their knees so that he won’t burn the place to the ground again.

The problem with the village on I, is that it really is tiny and there isn’t much treasure. There aren’t even enough people to make taking them into slavery all that profitable. And the monks, well, the monks are in a state of holy ecstasy, eager to preserve the location of Saint Columba’s relic that Helgi covets, and more than willing to die and meet their god.

Which is exactly what happens. To all except one scared and very young monk, hiding at the bottom of the shitter. Literally. In the pit under the craphole.

Brother Michael isn’t the only survivor. There are two others – the blacksmith’s wife, Una, honestly but guiltily grateful that one of the Vikings killed her brutal husband, and that selfsame, middle aged Viking, drunk and passed out on the floor of her cottage after drinking much too much of her very strong mead.

These three extremely unlikely survivors make a strange but surprisingly harmonious community on the tiny island. They have plenty of food, because the Vikings left a lot of the scattered livestock behind. The meadwife knows how to live off the land. Obviously, they have plenty to drink – even if the old Viking hits it a bit too hard.

Grimur knows even more about fixing and repairing buildings than he does about going a-Viking. The buildings are not going to fall down around their ears – at least not the ones they need.

While Brother Michael may not have had enough faith to face martyrdom, he does have enough to finish the great work of his monastery, the writing of a new copy of the gospels. A work in which he is sustained by Una’s cooking and Grimur’s carpentry.

As much as it could have gone that way, this is not a story about Brother Michael converting either the Odin-worshipping Grimur or the non-worshipping Una to his faith. Not that he doesn’t try. Instead, their tiny community represents the confluence of systems and beliefs that existed in that place, as they push and pull against each other but manage to make a life together all the same.

I expected this to end in tragedy, because this triumvirate feels like it can’t possibly survive – or if it does, that the raiders will come back and end it for them. Which they do, but they don’t. So instead, the story comes to a surprisingly peaceful, if not exactly happy, ending, as they each receive something of the life they want, even if the cost is ultimately high.

Escape Rating B: For something I picked up merely out of curiosity, I was surprised by how much I liked the book. Also that it was the right length for the story, because it’s just a tiny thing in a tiny place and it needed to be, well, a tiny story. Although it is bigger on the inside.

It is also, and I was really glad of this, an antidote to Haven by Emma Donoghue. On the surface the books are a bit similar, three people on a tiny island setting up a community. But Haven turned out to be a hate read/listen because the leader of the community was an arsehole, and his arseholishness had weight and heft because he had absolute power over the others.

The Book of I is both more interesting and more comfortable because Grimur, Michael and Una are equals. Both because they need each other to survive and because none of them start out with power. No one has to obey anyone. Theoretically, Grimur could force obedience from one or the other, but in practice he’s not the type AND he seems aware that while it would work temporarily it wouldn’t work in even the medium term. Brother Michael is harmless – and a bit gormless – while Grimur likes Una’s mead much too much to keep his guard up around her all the time.

So the story is of these three utterly disparate people learning to get along, and it works surprisingly well. So well, in fact, that when the next Viking raid does come, they pull off a neat trick, together, and save each other and the day. Which was not something that could have been predicted at the outset.

For a little book, I’ve ended up having a lot to say about it. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. It was like all the terrible bits of Haven got smoothed over by an infusion of Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, a combination that probably shouldn’t work but did.

Also, the language of this is lovely, and with the small-sized setting a lot of the story happens in either internal thoughts or conversations. That the author imbued his characters with a lot of life in their thoughts and speech isn’t really a surprise, as, while this may be the author’s debut NOVEL, he’s an award-winning playwright.

One final note, that leads back, I think, to Assassins Creed: Valhalla AND perhaps to the TV series Vikings, and that’s about language. I’ll admit that the references to “I” in the text gave me a bit of a jolt every time. Not that I couldn’t differentiate between the pronoun and the place name, but that I had to do it over and over. Which leads to the way that the language in which the story is written uses a lot of anachronisms. OTOH it puts the reader in the story instead of having to look up words that are no longer in use. But it also makes me wonder a bit how anachronistic the character’s thoughts and actions are. Which, in turn, led me to wonder how much we really know about the average person’s life in that time period – and I’m still thinking about that part.

In spite of that quibble, this was the right book at the right time. After last weekend reading some seriously dark short stories, I thought I was looking for something REALLY cozy, but I tried and the one I chose was just too twee and teeth-rottingly sweet. Which led me to yesterday’s book and, surprisingly, this one. They are both a bit cozy, but it’s the cozyness of the everyday and the ordinary between people who seem to be making real, and sometimes really hard, decisions that fit their circumstances – and more importantly, who I was happy to spend some time with to reset my brain.

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