The Paradise Motel is Eric McCormack’s first novel. He has already been compared with, amongst others, J L Borges and Bruce Chatwin on account of his extravagant imagination and his deep affection for the bizarre. But his stories, which he says, with typical understatement, ‘dabble… in the slightly alien areas of everyday life’ are told in lucid, deadpan prose. Despite living in Canada for ova twenty years he still speaks with a strong Glasgow accent which can be heard in the strong, measured style he uses to make his impossible tales plausible.

Ezra Stevenson, the narrator, is bequeathed a story by his grandfather, who comes home to Scotland after thirty years of travelling and who dies shortly after telling it. It is the story of four children, Esther, Zachary, Rachel and Amos who come to live in Scotland with their surgeon father