The Oatmeal Ark

‘So polished, so clever, so imaginative, so artful and so innovative…a remarkable, beguiling journey.’ Michael Thompson-Noel, Financial Times


‘We met, my great-grandson and I, more than a century after my death…’


The Reverend Hector Gillean is a ghost. At the start of the last century he built a ship and sailed west from the Hebrides to search for a promised land in the heart of the Canadian wilderness. Two hundred years later his great-grandson retraces the hopeful voyage from Scotland to Nova Scotia, across Canada by water and through three generations of extraordinary family history. A wave-rocked, wind-tossed travel adventure of ghosts and boats ensues. The minister-mariner, a paddle-wheel publisher and a boat-building broadcaster propel their living descendant across the world’s second largest country.


The Oatmeal Ark voyages into the deepest places of the heart, exploring love and hope and loss, and unravels the history of a divided nation whose parts have grown greater than its whole. Its story is at once a record of a remarkable pilgrimage, a fantastical narrative and a glimpse at the universal quest for a better world.