CANR
WORK TITLE: Fallow
WORK NOTES: Betty Trask Prize
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1989
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: Scottish
LAST VOLUME:
http://sandstonepress.com/books/fallow * http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/book-review-fallow-by-daniel-shand-1-4304925 * http://www.ed.ac.uk/profile/daniel-shand-0
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1989, in Kirkcaldy, Scotland.
EDUCATION:University of Dundee, M.A. (with honors); University of Edinburgh, M.Sc (with distinction).
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, novelist, short-story writer, and educator. Ph.D. candidate and Scottish literature tutor at the University of Edinburgh.
AWARDS:Arts & Humanities Research Council Award, 2011-12; Sloan Prize for fiction University of Edinburgh, 2012; Creative Writing Award, University of Dundee, 2012; University of Edinburgh, School of Literatures, Languages, & Cultures Scholarship, 2013-16; Saltire Society International Travel Bursary for Literature winner, 2016; Betty Trask Prize, 2017, for Fallow.
WRITINGS
Contributor of short fiction to magazines and periodicals.
SIDELIGHTS
Daniel Shand is a Scottish writer, novelist, and educator based in Edinburgh, Scotland. He is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Edinburgh. In addition to his studies, he also serves as a literature tutor at the university, teaching courses in both Scottish and English literature. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Dundee and the University of Edinburgh and does research on themes of “space in coming-of-age texts,” noted a writer on the University of Edinburgh website. His fiction has been recognized with awards such as the University of Edinburgh Sloan Prize for fiction and the University of Dundee Creative Writing Award.
Shand’s debut novel is titled Fallow. In an interview on the Book’s the Thing website, Shand remarked briefly on the creative process he used in writing the book. “I think it starts with figuring out the tone or voice of the book and going from there, how it should feel and sound. Once you have that down—and down well—it makes the rest of it much easier,” he stated.
Fallow is a “squid-ink black road trip through a surreal but recognizable Scotland. It is brave and nasty, occasionally and uncomfortably funny, always eminently readable,” commented Alan Bett, writing on the website Skinny. Protagonists Mikey and Paul are two brothers, two years apart in age, who have taken to the road. Mikey has only recently been released from prison after serving a sentence for an unspeakable crime—the murder of a child when Mikey himself was just thirteen years old. It is Paul’s intention to keep moving in an attempt to protect Mikey from the repercussions of his history and to keep him from running into anyone who might remember the crime. They spend most of their time living in a shabby tent in out-of-the-way places throughout Scotland.
Despite what Paul says, however, the reality may not match his words. “At first he seems to be what he presents himself as: the caring, responsible guardian of his withdrawn and damaged brother. Yet even in the first chapters he displays an aggression and furtiveness that suggest otherwise,” observed Scotsman reviewer Alan Massie. Paul urges Mikey to commit violence which he says is needed for self-preservation. Paul seems hard-edged and urgent, while Mikey is able to show compassion. As the novel progresses, “It gradually becomes less and less clear whether Paul is recounting real or imaginary events, and as his personality spirals downwards towards what seems inevitable destruction, the balance of power and leadership shifts between him and the younger and apparently much less bright Mikey,” commented a reviewer on the website Undiscovered Scotland.
In his review, Massie stated that the novel has “moments of brilliance—Shand is good on place, mood, and action” Fallow “is compelling, convincing and incredibly accomplished. At times it is unflinchingly violent, yet there is a compassion and vulnerability woven into the madness,” remarked a reviewer on the web site Random Things through My Letterbox.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Scotsman, November 30, 2016, Allan Massie, review of Fallow.
ONLINE
Book’s the Thing, http://www.booksthething.com/ (November 15, 2016), interview with Daniel Shand.
Daniel Shand Website, http://www.daniel-shand.com (August 16, 2017).
Nudge Book, https://www.nudge-book.com/ (December 31, 2016), Judith Griffith, review of Fallow.
Random Things through My Letterbox Blog, http://randomthingsthroughmyletterbox.blogspot.de/ (November 14, 2016), review of Fallow.
Skinny, http://www.theskinny.co.uk (December 19, 2016), Alan Bett, review of Fallow
Undiscovered Scotland, http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk (August 16, 2017), review of Fallow.
University of Edinburgh Website, http://www.ed.ac.uk/ (August 16, 2017), biography of Daniel Shand.*
Daniel Shand is a writer based in Edinburgh. His debut novel, Fallow, was published in 2016 and won the 2017 Betty Trask Prize.
He was born in Kirkcaldy in 1989 and has lived in Edinburgh since 2011, where he is a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh and a Scottish literature tutor.
His shorter work has been published in a number of magazines and he has performed at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
He won the 2012 University of Edinburgh Sloan Prize for fiction and the University of Dundee Creative Writing Award. In 2016, Daniel was the winner of the Saltire Society International Travel Bursary for Literature.
In 2016, his short story The Climb was awarded special commendation in the University of Aberdeen Flash Fiction Competition.
Daniel Shand
Contact details
Email: dshand@ed.ac.uk
Web: Website
Twitter
Publisher
Biography
Background
Daniel Shand is a fiction writer based in Edinburgh. His debut novel, Fallow, is due for publication in November 2016.
Qualifications
MA(Hons) - 1st - University of Dundee
MSc - Distinction - University of Edinburgh
Teaching & PhD supervision
Undergraduate teaching
Scottish Literature 1
English Literature 2
Research
Research summary
Daniel's thesis focuses on space in coming-of-age texts.
Projects
Current project grants
University of Edinburgh: School of Literatures, Languages, & Cultures Scholarship 2013-2016
Past project grants
Arts & Humanities Research Council Award 2011-2012
Interview with Daniel Shand – Author of Fallow
NOVEMBER 15, 2016 ~ ERIKA @ BOOKSTHETHING.COM
FallowAt the heart of this tense and at times times darkly comic novel is the relationship between two brothers bound by a terrible crime. Paul and Mikey are on the run, apparently from the press surrounding their house after Mikey’s release from prison. His crime – child murder, committed when he was a boy. As they travel, they move from one disturbing scenario to the next, eventually involving themselves with a bizarre religious cult. The power between the brothers begins to shift, and we realise there is more to their history than Paul has allowed us to know.
I have been a big fan of cross-country, road-trip type novels ever since reading The Talisman, so I was excited to get my hands on this book. Fallow was some trip! The details of the incident that landed Mikey in jail are fed to the reader bit-by-bit, and the more you start to realize what happened, the harder it is to put this book down. Once I spotted the twist headed my way, I had to keep reading until I got to the end. I just had to know what exactly happened years ago, and how it would all end up in the present. This was a thrilling debut novel, and I’ll be watching for more from this author.
Besides getting to read an early copy of the book, I had the chance to interview the author. I hope you’ll join me in welcoming Daniel Shand to The Book’s the Thing.
Congratulations on the publication of your debut novel, Fallow. I’d love to hear a bit about your writing process. Are you a pantser or plotter? Or something in between?
I think it starts with figuring out the tone or voice of the book and going from there, how it should feel and sound. Once you have that down—and down well—it makes the rest of it much easier.
Do you have any particular writing rituals that you adhere to, or unique methods of overcoming writers’ block?
Self-imposed deadlines help, so does trying to forget about writers’ block as a concept.
When did you know you wanted to be a writer? Have you been able to devote yourself to writing full time?
I haven’t sold a single book yet, so unfortunately no to your second question. I didn’t begin writing until I started to study literature—that was when I had the notion that it was even possible.
What do you enjoy doing when you’re not writing?
I go to the cinema a lot, to the pub with friends. I listen to podcasts all the time. I need cut down on that I think.
Although I read a little bit of almost everything, mysteries and thrillers are by far my favorites. How about you? Which genres or authors do you like to read? Are there any books or authors in particular that you’d say have influenced your desire to write?
I don’t tend to limit my reading to any particular style, though the books that stick with me tend to have a sense of humour and a certain darkness to them.
Now that Fallow has been published, what can we expect to see from you next? Do you have something else already in the works?
I’m working on something about a mother and daughter. That’s all I can say for now.
Thanks Daniel!
About the Author
Daniel Shand Writer EdinburghDaniel Shand is a writer based in Edinburgh.
He was born in Kirkcaldy in 1989 and has lived in Edinburgh since 2011, where he is a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh and a Scottish literature tutor.
His shorter work has been published in a number of magazines and he has performed at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
He won the 2012 University of Edinburgh Sloan Prize for fiction and the University of Dundee Creative Writing Award.
Website: http://www.daniel-shand.com/
Twitter: @danshand
NOTE: I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of the book.
Book review: Fallow, by Daniel Shand
ALLAN MASSIE Published: 11:00 Wednesday 30 November 2016 Share this article 0 HAVE YOUR SAY Paul and his younger brother Mikey are camping in the wild. They are on the run. Mikey, we soon learn, has recently been released from prison, having done time for the murder of a young girl when he was only a boy himself. Now Paul has taken him away, guarding him from the attentions of police, social workers, a psychologist and the press. Their mother would rather they had stayed at home, but Paul is determined that Mikey must be prevented from returning. Paul is the narrator, a voluble and, as we will discover, a less than reliable one. At first he seems to be what he presents himself as: the caring, responsible guardian of his withdrawn and damaged brother. Yet even in the first chapters he displays an aggression and furtiveness that suggest otherwise. He incites Mikey to acts of violence in what he tells him is self-protection, but it is Mikey, not Paul, who has moments of tenderness; Mikey, not Paul, who seems vulnerable. The book comes with a recommendation from Alan Warner who calls it “a brilliant, unpredictable road novel”. There are certainly moments of brilliance – Shand is good on place, mood, and action, and it may indeed be described as a road novel, since the brothers wander wildly over the country, sometimes on foot, sometimes in stolen vehicles. In the best tradition of the picaresque, they encounter a variety of people, some friendly, some hostile, some a bit crazy. Towards the end they find themselves in a protest camp run by New Age religious zealots. There is a wealth of incident and not all actions apparently have the consequences you might expect. A man, for instance, is killed and buried and his house briefly taken over, with no subsequent fuss. The reader’s credulity is likely, quite often, to be strained near to breaking-point. Some suspension of disbelief is therefore necessary, made possible by the pace of the narrative. Yet if the novel was simply a picaresque tale, one thing after another, it might be enjoyable enough, but no more than that – especially since few of the characters the brothers meet are interesting, one or two barely convincing, and the dialogue is for the most part drab, functional at best. The real interest of the novel lies elsewhere, and is of high quality. The shifting relationship between the brothers is deftly and intelligently explored and developed. You may anticipate the denouement, while being unsure of just how and when the mystery will be unravelled. Shand is concerned with the complexity of feeling, the tensions between the brothers – joined together by guilt, resentment, fear and need – and also a depth of affection surprising but believable in the circumstances. Essentially it’s a psychological study and the person under the microscope is the unreliable narrator, apparently concerned at the outset only to protect his damaged younger brother. In the course of the narrative the relationship is turned inside-out, upside-down. What we are invited to take as fact comes to seem fancy. Now you see it, now you don’t. Who, one wonders, is the brother really in need of protection? And from what? Shand coolly presents us with the disintegration of a personality. He does so with considerable skill and daring – daring because it might have been easier to show this in a third-person narrative. However, he brings it off. Fallow is a first novel, and like many first novels is overpacked: too many incidents, too many characters (though some of the minor, incidental ones are neatly and pleasingly done), too many scenes that go on after their purpose has been served. You might call it self-indulgent. But it is redeemed by its psychological acuity, and the author’s ability simultaneously to observe and inhabit his characters, to present them as they are, and, in the case of Paul, as he sees himself and unwittingly reveals himself. Daniel Shand is a young writer, still in his twenties. I’m pretty sure he won’t be a one-book novelist. He will do better than this, but this is a very good beginning. n Fallow by Daniel Shand, Sandstone Press, 277pp, £8.99
Fallow by Daniel Shand
★★★★
Book Review by Alan Bett | 19 Dec 2016
Book title: Fallow
Author: Daniel Shand
They say write what you know, and so many debut novels are rooted in the author’s everyday with the result as dreary and mundane as most lives truthfully are. Daniel Shand dares to make his debut, Fallow, both close to home and fantastical. Dark fantasy at that; a squid-ink black road trip through a surreal but recognisable Scotland. It is brave and nasty, occasionally and uncomfortably funny, always eminently readable.
Shand tells the story of Mikey and Paul: brothers carrying the burden of a hidden history which refuses to lay dormant, continually surfacing from the murky waters of memory. The book’s cover image is troublingly reminiscent of the closing shot of John Boorman’s Deliverance – that dark tale of guilt and repression, culminating in an horrific submerged truth weighed down with rocks. The recreational cruelty of Shand's brothers also offers reflections of Michael Haneke’s impishly provocative Funny Games.
On the literary side this is closer in tone and viewpoint to The Wasp Factory, with its unreliable and uneasy first person narration, and like that work it is both disturbing and intriguing to live inside the mind Shand constructs on the page. He colours this central character well, yet not fully, and while a further spoon-fed back story is uneccessary, additional rounding could have been added to the warped psychology. If we're being critical, the final section also seems a little rushed, as if dots are being joined for the final conclusion and one or two are missed.
Those points aside, this is a thrilling work, unafraid to delve into the mind's dark corners yet measured in how this is carried out; devoid of garish exploitation. The prose is confidently stripped down in the main, its function to move the narrative along at pace, yet punctuated occasionally by fine poetic flourishes; an egg bleeds ‘a string of daisy yolk’ and a water’s edge is marbled like meat. This should herald an exciting new name in Scottish literature, one who has the reader’s experience clearly in mind and is willing to thrill and disgust in equal measure.
Out now, published by Sandstone Press, RRP £8.99
Paul and Mikey are two brothers on the run. Mikey has been released from prison after a long spell inside for a child murder committed when the brothers were both little more then children themselves, aged fifteen and thirteen. He's been the subject of intense press interest since his release, and his older brother Paul has decided that they need to escape the media and the hostile public interest generated by its coverage. We encounter Paul and Mikey living in a tent in a field in an oddly out-of-focus corner of Scotland. Paul spends his days walking into the local town to buy provisions and to check whether Mikey's photo has ceased to appear in the newspapers.
But even in the remote place Paul has chosen, their presence begins to attract unwelcome attention and events take a much darker turn. Some of the locals in the town take an interest in Paul's daily routine, and the brothers' campsite is also noticed. We follow the story through Paul's eyes as he and Mikey try to resolve their growing problems in a shocking way, before abandoning their bolt-hole. We follow them to Arran, and then to a peace camp near the Royal Navy's nuclear submarine base on Gare Loch, where they become involved in an outlandish religious cult. It gradually becomes less and less clear whether Paul is recounting real or imaginary events, and as his personality spirals downwards towards what seems inevitable destruction, the balance of power and leadership shifts between him and the younger and apparently much less bright Mikey.
"Fallow" by Daniel Shand is a book that beautifully draws the reader into Paul's fractured and bizarre take on the world. It is also a book it is much easier to recommend than to categorise. You could call it a road novel, and there's certainly more than a hint of Jack Kerouac in the way the brothers move from place to place and from encounter to encounter. But perhaps more than that it's a novel that gives the reader a compelling insight into a deeply disturbed mind, the mind of a man losing touch with reality and with rationality. The reader is forced to ask how much of what Paul is experiencing is the product of the world around him, and how much is actually formed by his own deeply distorted inner view of that world and his memories of past events. As the brothers fall ever deeper into the hole they - mostly Paul - are digging for themselves, it seems increasingly clear to the reader that there cannot be anything other than a totally disastrous outcome to what we are witnessing. But this is a book in which nothing is ever quite what it seems...
Fallow by Daniel Shand
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Review published on December 31, 2016.
Fallow tells the story of two brothers, Paul and Mikey, who are on the run following Mikey’s release from prison for a crime committed when he was a child. As they move from place to place and try to stay ahead of the press and the public, their situation becomes stranger and more dangerous.
This is Daniel Shand’s debut novel. As the relationship between the two brothers is revealed as the novel progresses, the reader is drawn into their uncomfortable predicament and Shand does an excellent job of portraying both their characters, especially Paul. Although the crime is revealed fairly early on, you want to keep on reading to see how the novel pans out and how the brothers’ relationship will develop. For me, the ending was a bit predictable, but I did enjoy Fallow and would definitely recommend it.
Judith Griffith 4/3
Fallow by Daniel Shand
Sandstone Press 9781910985342 pbk Nov 2016
MONDAY, 14 NOVEMBER 2016
FALLOW BY DANIEL SHAND #BLOGTOUR @DANSHAND @SANDSTONEPRESS
At the heart of this tense and at times times darkly comic novel is the relationship between two brothers bound by a terrible crime.
Paul and Mikey are on the run, apparently from the press surrounding their house after Mikey s release from prison. His crime child murder, committed when he was a boy.
As they travel, they move from one disturbing scenario to the next, eventually involving themselves with a bizarre religious cult.
The power between the brothers begins to shift, and we realise there is more to their history than Paul has allowed us to know.
Fallow by Daniel Shand is published in paperback by Sandstone Press on 17 November and is the author's debut novel.
Fallow is a novel that takes the reader on a journey, accompanying two brothers as they flee from the a situation that has consumed both of them for much of their lives.
Paul and Mikey are travelling light, with just a tent and a few clothes, they've camped out in the hills. Paul leads and Mikey follows. Paul buys the food, calls the shots and makes the decisions.
It is quite a while before the reader realises that Mikey has spent the past ten years in prison, we are teased with Paul's memories of the day that changed their life. The day that Mikey was annoyed with his teacher and the two boys skived off school. The day that they came across a small girl; Gail Shaw, and tempted her into the woods. The day that Gail Shaw didn't return to her family.
It is clear that Paul does not want to lose Mikey again, and he convinces himself, and the reader that it is because he cares. He doesn't want Mikey to undergo more interviews, and tests. He wants them to put things behind them, to start again. Paul will stop at nothing to make sure that this happens.
Some of the people that the brothers meet on their travels are friendly, some are not. Some are suspicious, some want things from them. Most of them are dealt with by Paul. Coolly, calmly and with no hesitation. Until the day that they find themselves amongst a strange collection of people who follow a bizarre cult leader, this is when Paul falters and Mikey strengthens.
Tense, brutal, threatening and with sparks of deeply black humour, this is a story unlike any other that I've read. The author has written a novel that is deviously chilling, he has picked apart this intense relationship between two brothers and inspected each part, exposing the hidden and revealing the truth.
Fallow is compelling, convincing and incredibly accomplished. At times it is unflinchingly violent, yet there is a compassion and vulnerability woven into the madness. Chilling and powerful, Daniel Shand is a talented new author, certainly one to watch.
My thanks to the publisher who sent my review copy and invited me to take part in this Blog Tour.
Daniel Shand was born in Kirkcaldy in 1989 and currently lives in Edinburgh, where he is a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh and a Scottish literature tutor.
His shorter work has been published in a number of magazines and he has performed at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
He won the University of Edinburgh Sloan Prize for Fiction and the University of Dundee Creative Writing Award.
For more information visit www.daniel-shand.com
Follow him on Twitter @danshand