Phantom Limb tells the story of a young Scottish minister named Gillis. Having failed to make it as a long-distance runner in England, he returns to the small village of Kirkmouth to enter the Church, despite having very little in the way of religious conviction beyond his family name (Gillis means ‘servant of Jesus’ in Gaelic). Gillis’s sedate existence in this poor community is soon disrupted, however, by his chance unearthing of a severed left hand: ‘Four fingers and a thumb, a broken wrist and a bracelet of ragged flesh’. The hand appears to Gillis to be very old, like a religious relic. It then begins to move and, when Gillis thinks to give it a pen, to scratch the strange drawings the reader will find scattered throughout the book.

Told in brief interleaved sections is the tale of the hand’s owner, an apprentice painter living ‘hundreds of years ago’ called Jan. He is travelling from the Lowlands to deliver a Bible to a nobleman. Like Gillis, Jan is faithless, often selfish and asocial, but his endeavour – a trip through Reformation-era Scotland – adds historical depth to a novel that might otherwise feel unstructured. The sections narrating Jan’s journey are tighter and more descriptive than those following Gillis. Kohler’s prose, however, is gorgeous throughout. He beautifully portrays the minister’s mounting delusions of grandeur as he tries, and fails, to ascertain what the hand is attempting to convey.

Driven towards collapse, Gillis is fuelled by the prospect of obtaining an answer. He’s convinced that the hand, through him, will deliver an important message, imagines himself holding it ‘above an enormous crowd’. Maybe, he thinks, he’ll ‘walk at the head of a column of people’. This is a novel