Rock of ages

Abstract

All the characters in Evie Wyld's novel The Bass Rock are hunted, haunted, or both. Wyld's novel won the 2021 Stella Awards, a $50 000 (AUD) literary prize aiming “to counter the gender bias rife in the Australian literary landscape…and promote cultural change through the recognition of women's perspectives”. Wyld, who grew up in Australia and the UK, set her latest novel in a gothic Scotland. The eponymous Bass Rock, a volcanic plug in the Firth of Forth, lurks as a foreboding, unmoving presence throughout the three changing timelines of Wyld's narrative: the early 1700s, post-World War 2, and the present day. As Wyld explains in an interview, these women “are telling the same story—and witch hunting has just evolved into something slightly different, with a different name.”