There are different forms of justice meted out to various characters and this raises some interesting questions about punishment, revenge and rehabilitation. Imagine being unable to stand up for yourself and to rely on a complete stranger to communicate on your behalf. Prue Leith at the Edinburgh International Book Festival If The Great British Bake Off is your first encounter with Prue Leith, you’ve missed a great deal. I was really interested in this book - I have a hearing impairment myself and am learning BSL so it was nice to recognise some familiar signs.

In between these meetings we have Robert’s trips to Glasgow which take a large chunk of the book while achieving little. But in many ways this is no bad thing: Smith’s exploration of deaf experience makes for a unique piece of historical fiction. It has everything you could possibly want from historical crime; murderers, madhouses, the crushing pressure of class barriers and a crime that spins across a true cross-section of Scottish social history.Finally, we also meet some characters that will equate deafness with not being of sound mind (and the commonly used term back in the day was “deaf and dumb”, this is repeatedly used in the book by all characters, by the way). This production uses a fusion of sign language, image and performance to tell the story of Jean Campbell, a Deaf woman in Glasgow, who in 1817 was accused of murder when her young child fell from her shoulders and drowned in the Clyde. I also loved that throughout the book we meet different people with different “theories” on deafness. The fact that she has so many modern attitudes – being open about her desire for her labourer boyfriend, not minding that he’s from the other side of the sectarian divide, and the fact that she ‘shows no shame or remorse’ about living in sin seals the deal.

At one point there is even a conversation about translating vs interpreting Jean in Court and how it would be possible to deny her truth and reword it for the sake of the jury, again this highlighted how even those sympathetic to disability hold the power. As Robert and Jean manage construct a simple way of communicating he starts to gains her trust, Jean starts to confides in her interpreter, imparting the truth.

If found guilty, Jean faces two equally terrible punishments; death by hanging, or commitment to an asylum. Just for context: British Sign Language was not recognised as a language until 2003, nearly 200 years later and certainly not something that was particularly accessible to many d/Deaf people at that time. I sometimes struggle a little with historical fiction which is often so riveting, well written and interesting but so many aspects are made up and I end up struggling to separate fact from fiction.

Jean Campbell, a young deaf woman, was brought to the Edinburgh court for throwing her baby into the river - a number of witnesses were sure they saw just that. Lots of inconsequential chapters - swathes of Robert going to Glasgow multiple times to look for Donnelly and not finding him? Because ‘the name is common in towns or villages throughout the country where there once was a row of tumbledown cottages infested with rats’.The narrative voice dips in and out of the time period of the book, it’s not quite as antiquated as an actual book from the early 1800s but, for a lot of the book, it resides in a sort of vaguely 19th century tone, matching how the characters talk. As their relationship develops he moves from interpreter to investigator as he seeks to find the truth of what happened. Whether Sibbald was supremely confident about the state of the people in the cells or whether there were currently no other inhabitants apart from the newly arrived Glaswegian murderess, Robert couldn’t tell. I will say that unfortunately it felt like Jean, the truth of what happened to her son, and the court case, was more of a subplot, the trial itself was rather brief and the verdict not particularly the purpose of the story but a formality, which was a little disappointing.

The writing talent coming out of Scotland at the moment is immense and Smith is right up there with the best. Ok so I'm going to put it out there and say that I'm Scottish but ashamedly haven't read a lot of Scottish books but this year I'm wanting to change that and have started with this (not to mention a perfect choice for my Around the World Challenge); what a book I chose to change things. An immensely important debut that gives a voice to those from our history who are often forgotten, who didn’t have their own voice and who have always been here. It gives voice to a woman who didn’t have a voice, at a time when women in general had little voice.The writing is pleasant and tactful and Jean Campbell was an endearing character, I just wished I spent more time with her.