How might we bring into words, places that exist as imagined, half-known, remembered or dreamt about... and to have those same words do the job of stone and lime, window-glass, doorways, stairs and rooms? Such is the task Peter Davidson has set himself here, and he answers these questions and more with his customary fineness of expression, and with grace and elegance.

In his ‘Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’, Jorge Luis Borges uses a fictional Irish political murder to imagine the ways in which history plays out as theatre. In his Secret Theatres, Peter Davidson does the same for Scotland. How best to represent a theatrical tradition ‘scarred by gaps and absences’, he wonders, before answering in a series of startling historical visions. In Davidson’s bleakly beautiful work, as in few other modern writers, worlds beyond this one come tantalisingly into focus. Drawing the reader irresistibly into its ritual performance, Secret Theatres casts a subtle and enduring spell.’

                  David Wheatley