Allan Cameron's modern Candide, an Italian journalist, whirls back and forth across the dark landscape of Scotland's 2014 independence referendum like a shoogly meteor. Sometimes his cynical, witty comments light up the dark corners of Yes thinking, sometimes the sullen assumptions of the Better Together campaign. He meets and hears a score of fascinating characters with their own opinions, most of them foreigners making their own effort to understand the country. Towards the end, the fictional Italian writes down some of the wisest and most moving comments to be found on the epiphany of those amazing months. - Neal Ascherson

Allan Cameron was born in 1952, grew up in Nigeria and Bangladesh, and lived as a young adult in Italy. He has written two novels, The Golden Menagerie (Luath Press, 2004), partly based on Apuleius' The Golden Ass but also a polemic against it, and The Berlusconi Bonus (Luath Press 2005), a political satire principally directed at Western consumerism, the policies of Bush and Blair, and Fukuyama's now disowned victory song of American capitalism. His non-fiction work, In Praise of the Garrulous(2008 and 2013), is an examination of the essentiality of language to human nature. His two collections of short stories, Can the Gods Cry? and On the Heroism of Mortals were published in 2011 and 2012. Over the years, he has translated twenty-four books, and his two collections of poetry, Presbyopia and A Barrel of Dried Leaves were published in 2009 and 2016.

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