The Story & The Song

With a soundtrack to a Shetland tale, author and musician Malachy Tallack blends his artistic passions in his latest venture

- DAWN GEDDES

AWARD-WINNING Scottish author Malachy Tallack A published his first book, Sixty Degrees North, in 2015, but the novelist's passion for words started as a passion for song. Now Malachy is combining his two great loves with the release of his latest novel, That Beautiful Atlantic Waltz, which is accompanied by a concept album of the same name.

"My writing started with music," he says. "I mostly wrote songs from my teens through to my mid-20s.I was writing, recording and performing songs, too, but then I began thinking about turning my hand to longer prose and trying to write books, so that's where my writing time and focus went. Then I found that I stopped writing songs completely. My first book came out nine years ago and from that point, my music has taken a back seat.

"During the pandemic, like a lot of people, I was thinking differently about work and where I wanted to focus my time. I started thinking about contentment and joy, and how to find that in work. It's not always easy to find it with writing because it can be a slog at times. I started to play music and began thinking about songs again, and that's when the idea for this novel emerged. Both things came together at the same time. It wasn't too deliberate, they just sort of fell together, the story and the music."

Set in the 1950s and present day, That Beautiful Atlantic Waltz centres around the lives of Sonny and Jack.

Sonny is working on a whaling ship in the South Atlantic in 1957, reckoning with the most vicious storms he has ever seen. When he finally returns to his Shetland home to build a life with his wife and young son, the legacy of his time at sea is felt by all of them.