Margaret Bryce has been having a hard time since dying in 2014.

In a place beyond, we join Margaret as she revisits her life, from her Aberdeen prefab childhood to the birth of her twin girls, through Thatcher’s Britain, the Piper Alpha oil rig disaster, Australia’s Black Summer bushfires, the death of Princess Diana and the COVID pandemic. But something isn’t quite right. Margaret is trying to remember, but also fighting to forget.

A Country of Eternal Light will take you on a journey like no other. It is an utterly original, bitingly funny and poignant novel about life, death, what we choose to remember - and what we’d do anything to forget.

A Waterstones Scottish Book of the Month

Shortlisted for the Readings New Australian Fiction Prize

Shortlisted for the Age Fiction Book of the Year

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'This thoughtful novel hopscotches through the life of its late heroine, Margaret, a working-class Aberdonian whose posthumous thoughts roam freely over seven decades after she dies of cancer in 2014… A life-crammed mosaic, filled with pain and sadness as well as tenderness and beauty'

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'Inviting the reader on a rollicking, spellbinding journey as Margaret Bryce visits her past from the vantage point of the afterlife, A Country of Eternal Light is a fiercely original exploration of the way a person's life is constructed'

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'A fearlessly ambitious and profoundly moving exploration of 'complicated grief', it is deftly delivered with an honesty, humour and compassion that make it wholly accessible and relatable. An uncanny and evocative original fiction with a stunning twist' 

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'a beautifully poignant record of a life that brought great sorrow but, nonetheless, was one well lived'

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'Dalgarno's novel illuminates experiences of loss with humour and tenderness'

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'Inventive, playful, poignant and deeply moving'

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'One of the most interesting and inventive novels of the year in terms of style and content'