An unconventional travelogue of three journeys taken to the Isle of Lewis and the South Uist in the Hebrides, taking the reader through the lives of people, past and present, while at the same time placing them within the context of Gaelic culture, religion, and local superstition.The islands are seen as a continuum in which past and present occupy a single plane. ‘What happened a few thousand years ago,’ Kociejowski writes, ‘no longer seems so very far away in time. It is what islands induce in one, a sense of simultaneity, as well as the old penchant a fool might have for occupying several dimensions at once. And the people who inhabited those ancient places seem more and more like ourselves whereas, at times, our contemporaries become increasingly, troublingly, remote.’ And he continues, ‘Stories must have been told on the earthen floors of those Bronze Age roundhouses just as they would still be told at cèilidhs three thousand years later.’ A fire calls for stories. And yet within a time span of only fifty years, with the coming of electricity, mass media and smartphones, and with English as the dominant language, modernity threatens to quench that fire. Still, the author argues, there lingers in most people a desire to be told stories, a desire as ancient as oatcakes.

Praise for The Serpent Coiled in NaplesMarius Kociejowski is one of life’s great questioners [and] The Serpent Coiled in Naples takes on some of the largest questions that come with searching for this stupendous city’s soul . . . The experience is more of an intellectual joyride than a standard history.”—Claudia Roth Pierpont