Dominic Cooper

The moment before he left the kirk, he was still one of the village congregation and the half-view of the road outside was almost beyond his reach. And in that brief moment his resolve began to waver. But then with a single pace more he was out and part of the land and the circling ocean, with the blue veil and the combings of the high cirrus standing far above. And the people of Acheninver, the witnesses of his long years of defeat, were, quite suddenly, behind him, mere ghosts of his past.

Murdo Munro works in the forests of an island on the West Coast of Scotland. Although long inured to the coldness of his marriage, it is on the wedding day of his daughter that he finally decides to take action. Whilst his flight north is a voyage of joyous release, it is also a time when self-doubt and fear of an uncertain future soon come to dominate his thoughts. But for all this, and for all his wavering determination to be free of his past, Sunrise is a paean to the magnificent completeness of nature, something which brings comfort and strength to Murdo, assisting him in his struggle to be true to himself.

“Yielding man and unyielding nature are compellingly done.”

New Statesman

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