The Leaper

Seumas Macdonald is an outsider, not only because he lives on an isolated primitive croft, but also because, being the only child in the school to speak Gaelic (apart from his disturbed sister), he is the favourite of MacCallum the headmaster, which leads to the boy being bullied in the playground. MacCallum comes in his boat for ceilidhs with the Macdonald family, to preserve the evocative Gaelic names of birds and flowers, and to teach Seumas to read and write what the headmaster calls 'the language of Eden' which, like the natural world, is under threat. The...