A Formal Academic Literary Review
I. Introduction
E.M. Linden, a speculative fiction writer from Aotearoa New Zealand, has established a recognizable voice at the intersection of literary and genre fiction—a position her publisher descriptors acknowledge with the phrase “a bit literary and a bit speculative” (Linden). Her short fiction has appeared in venues of significant standing within the field, including Strange Horizons, The Dark, Weird Horror, and PodCastle, and her 2024 story “A Cure for Solastalgia” (Strange Horizons) earned a place on the Locus Magazine Recommended Reading List. This pattern of publication reveals an author consistently drawn to the ecological, the elegiac, and the liminal—an author for whom speculative estrangement serves not escapism but emotional and philosophical excavation. “The Tawlish Island Songbook of the Dead,” first published in PodCastle in 2025, represents a mature expression of these preoccupations.
The story concerns the dead of Tawlish, a small island community whose living descendants have been evacuated to the mainland, and the multigenerational aftermath of that rupture measured across time, memory, and music. Told in an unusual second-person-plural voice—”we, the dead”—the narrative charts the slow erosion of ghostly identity as the living drift away, and then the unexpected restoration of that identity when a descendant returns to burn a songbook as a ritual offering. The story is deceptively compact; beneath its lyrical surface lies a sustained meditation on cultural memory, ecological displacement, the paradox of forgetting and preservation, and the ontological stakes of song.
This review argues that “The Tawlish Island Songbook of the Dead” achieves a rare synthesis of formal innovation and emotional precision, deploying its speculative conceit—a community of ghosts tethered to their island—as a vehicle for examining the phenomenology of cultural loss and the conditions under which communal identity survives rupture. In doing so, Linden situates her work within a broader tradition of island-evacuation literature and the emerging discourse of solastalgia, while producing a story whose affective and structural achievement exceeds the sum of its influences. The story is, ultimately, a hymn to the persistence of connection across every kind of threshold: between living and dead, present and past, homeland and diaspora, silence and song.
II. Summary of Plot, Setting, and Characters
“The Tawlish Island Songbook of the Dead” opens at the moment of evacuation. Thirty-seven living inhabitants of Tawlish—a fictional island strongly suggestive of the Scottish or Irish Atlantic periphery—are boarding boats and leaving for the mainland, driven out by brackish water, encroachment of the sea, lack of schools, and the grinding conditions of island life. The story is narrated collectively by the island’s dead, who watch from shore, unable to cross salt water. Among the living, two figures are foregrounded: Katie Zell, a child carried to the boat by her uncle, and Maureen Stornaway, an older woman who regards evacuation as defeat. Katie’s mother carries the island’s songbook—a volume of spell-songs capable of nudging winds, calling drowned bodies ashore, and healing the sick—tucked inside her jacket.
The narrative then follows the living across generations on the mainland, always focalized through the watching, dreaming dead. Katie grows up, studies anthropology, collects oral histories from evacuees, discovers her musical inheritance, and becomes a folk musician of local renown. Maureen Stornaway ages, mourns her island-buried children, and eventually forgives the mainland when modern medicine saves her grandchild’s life. The rector—smug, mainland-born—is revealed, in an unexpected moment of moral complexity, to have buried the suicidal Lizzie Knell within the churchyard rather than in the eroding sinner’s walk, an act of compassion that quietly undoes his own theology.
Meanwhile, on Tawlish, the dead erode. Without the songs and presence of the living, they lose their shapes and names. They forget what music is, even as they cling to the memory that it existed. The story’s climax arrives when a young descendant—carrying multiple bloodlines of the island community—rows back to Tawlish with a friend. He carries Katie’s copy of the songbook, now supplemented with new songs written by the living about the dead. He burns it as a gift. The dead receive it, and singing begins again.
The primary characters, then, are not individual subjects in a conventional narrative sense but rather representative presences. Katie Zell is the most fully realized among the living: a figure of mediation, inheritance, and creative transmission. The collective dead function as a single, polyphonic protagonist. Katie’s father—drowned before her birth—is the most individuated ghost, his paternal love for a daughter he cannot know rendered with particular tenderness. Maureen Stornaway anchors the story’s secondary emotional register: the experience of the aged survivor who must learn that survival itself can become a form of place.
III. Critical Analysis
A. Central Themes
Cultural Memory and the Archive
The songbook of the title is, above all, an archive. It holds not mere entertainment but functional magic: “spell-songs that nudge the wind and sing fish into nets, that knit bones and heal coughs and call the drowned ashore for burial.” This characterization of song as operative knowledge—not decorative but instrumental to survival—positions the text within a tradition of thinking about oral and material culture as technologies of communal reproduction. The story implicitly engages the work of scholars such as Jan Vansina, whose foundational study Oral Tradition as History (1985) argues that oral archives are not merely mnemonic but generative, capable of producing social reality rather than merely recording it. The songs of Tawlish do not describe a world; they constitute one. Their loss is therefore not nostalgic in the conventional sense—not a longing for the past—but ontological: without the songs, the dead cannot sustain their own existence as differentiated selves.
This distinction is crucial to the story’s philosophical project. The narrative refuses the consolation of pure nostalgia. The dead want the songbook back not because it connects them to a golden past but because, as the text makes explicit, without song they “lose the names. Faces. Families.” They are “losing ourselves without them, our shapes and our names.” The archive, in Linden’s telling, is not a repository of the dead past but a living infrastructure of identity—more closely aligned with what Aleida Assmann has termed “cultural memory” (Cultural Memory and Western Civilization, 2011), a form of long-term memory that enables communities to locate themselves in time, than with simple nostalgia.
Ecological Displacement and Solastalgia
The story’s opening inventory of the island’s failures—”the freshwater spring gone brackish; the water, always encroaching; the colicky, relentless wind”—situates the evacuation within a recognizable ecology of environmental decline. The details closely parallel the historical evacuation of St Kilda in 1930, in which the final thirty-six residents of Britain’s most remote inhabited archipelago, their numbers reduced by emigration and illness, petitioned the government for removal (Steel, The Life and Death of St. Kilda, 1975). Linden draws on this historical substrate without being bound by it; Tawlish is clearly a composite fiction that borrows from multiple Atlantic island traditions, and the Author’s Note confirms that the story “draws on my own and my family’s experiences of migration.”
The emotional condition of both the living and the dead in this story aligns closely with what philosopher Glenn Albrecht has termed “solastalgia”: the distress produced by environmental change impacting people while they are still connected to their home environment, a form of suffering distinct from conventional nostalgia in that it is experienced in the present rather than retrospectively (Albrecht et al., “Solastalgia: The Distress Caused by Environmental Change,” Australasian Psychiatry 15, 2007). This is the condition of Maureen Stornaway, who takes a knuckle of island rock in her pocket, and of the dead, who “erode” in concert with the island’s physical deterioration. For both, the displacement is not a clean departure but an ongoing assault upon identity that continues after the bodily removal is complete. It is worth noting that one of Linden’s earlier stories is literally titled “A Cure for Solastalgia” (Strange Horizons, 2024), indicating that this conceptual territory is a sustained preoccupation in her work rather than a passing motif.
The Reciprocity of the Living and the Dead
At the story’s structural center is a particular theory of mutual dependence between the living and the dead. The dead need the living not merely for sustenance but for definition: “their songs and laughter reminding us who we are, their bones buried beside ours in the thin Tawlish soil.” The living, symmetrically, need the dead as anchors of cultural identity—though they do not always know it. The story’s emotional pivot hinges on the revelation that this need has never ceased, even when silence seemed to indicate abandonment. The new songs sewn into the back of the returned songbook—songs “for us and about us,” songs that constitute “proof”—reveal that the living have been carrying the dead with them all along: “The threads have never gone slack. They criss-cross the strait, our weft, their warp: love and loss, life and death, past and present.”
This textile metaphor—weft, warp, weaving—recurs throughout the story, notably in the title of the folk tune Katie most loves: “The Weaver’s Loom.” It is the story’s governing structural image, and its implications reach beyond the merely decorative. The metaphor of weaving as cultural continuity has deep roots in Celtic literary tradition, where the bardic function was precisely to weave the community’s dead, living, and yet-unborn into a single continuous fabric. Linden employs this image with evident intention, linking Katie’s folk musicianship to an archaic understanding of the singer as social fabric-maker.
Grief and Its Accommodation
Alongside its interest in cultural memory, the story offers an astute phenomenology of individual grief. Maureen Stornaway’s sequence at the seaside—observing a mother comfort a toddler, and being taken unwillingly back through fifty years of memory—is among the most precisely observed passages in the text: “Everyone talks about it as if it rises and falls, as if it has seasons. The truth is, she’ll orbit it her whole life, and she’ll never be able to look at it without flinching.” The solar metaphor here—grief as the sun itself, not subject to seasons but the very axis of a life—repudiates the normative frameworks of mourning culture with a bluntness that feels clinically and emotionally accurate. The story does not propose resolution to grief; it proposes instead the possibility of learning to live at a survivable distance from it, as Maureen does when she forgives the mainland upon the birth of her medically-saved grandchild.
The dead’s grief, meanwhile, is of a different order: not the grief of loss but the grief of erasure, of ceasing to know what one has lost. This is the story’s most philosophically distinctive move—the suggestion that forgetting is a form of dying more final than death itself, and that to be remembered is a form of survival.
B. Form and Style
Narrative Structure
The story is organized as an extended temporal panorama, moving across multiple generations from the moment of evacuation to the moment of the songbook’s return. Its structure is essentially elegiac—a lament proceeding toward unexpected consolation—but Linden departs from the elegiac tradition’s typical movement from loss to acceptance. Instead, the story enacts a gradual erosion followed by a sudden restoration, a formal rhythm that mirrors its thematic content: the slow fading of the dead and the sudden rekindling of identity when the songbook arrives.
The narrative avoids linear causality in favor of lyrical juxtaposition. Scenes from the mainland (Katie at university; Maureen at the seaside; the birth of the Stornaway baby) alternate with scenes on the island (the dead clutching gorse against the wind; the squabble over the charred violin), and the effect is contrapuntal: each strand comments on the other without explicit authorial direction. This contrapuntal structure is itself a formal enactment of the story’s argument—that the living and the dead are in continuous, if largely invisible, dialogue.
Point of View
The story’s most conspicuous formal choice is its first-person-plural narrator: “We, the dead of Tawlish.” This is an unusual and demanding perspective, one that requires the reader to inhabit a collective subjectivity defined by incompleteness—the dead do not know what they do not know—while simultaneously being given occasional “we don’t know that” passages in which the narrator acknowledges the limits of its perspective in ways that produce dramatic irony. The reader is told, for instance, that “we don’t know that Katie’s life is music,” even as Katie’s musical gifts are described in detail. The effect is to position the reader as a privileged witness to a communion that the dead themselves cannot experience until the story’s end. This is a subtle and affecting manipulation of narrative irony, and it sustains the story’s central mystery—whether the dead will be remembered—across its full length.
The collective voice also performs the story’s argument about communal identity. The dead do not speak as individuals but as a single, polyphonic body; the moments at which individual voices emerge (“He is Finlay Price’s grandson. No, he’s Zennor Canne’s youngest child”) are marked as disruptions of the collective murmur, signs of returning individuation as the living approach. This suggests that selfhood, for the dead of Tawlish, is not a private possession but a communal achievement.
Imagery and Symbolism
The story is pervaded by the imagery of water: the encroaching sea, the salt the dead cannot cross, the sea-spray that living characters mistake for the touch of ghosts, the “swell and surge” of Tawlish song. Water functions simultaneously as barrier (the dead are fixed to the island by their inability to cross salt), as medium (dreams travel across the strait), and as metaphor for the continuous, wave-like motion of cultural transmission. The story’s opening image—the living wading into the sea to reach the boats—places the threshold between land and water at the center of the narrative’s symbolic geography. To leave is to enter water; to return is to recross it.
The songbook itself functions as a material symbol of what might be called the “portable archive”—the cultural object that condenses a community’s identity into a form that can be carried across displacement. Its physical condition—”salt-splashed pages,” “blurred notations”—enacts the attrition of transmission: the archive is not perfectly preserved but partially legible, requiring active interpretation and supplementation. The new songs stitched into the back of the book are significant in this regard; they represent not the recovery of the original but its living continuation, an archive that has grown through the very process of dispersal.
Fire, the medium through which gifts cross between the living and the dead, is the story’s third governing image. Objects burned on Tawlish “arrive smelling of smoke.” The burning of the songbook at the story’s climax is the definitive gift, the gesture that restores the dead to themselves. Fire in this context is explicitly transformative rather than destructive—a threshold medium analogous to salt water, capable of conducting matter from one ontological register to another.
Tone
The story’s tone is one of muted, persistent elegy, punctuated by moments of unexpected warmth. Linden avoids sentimentality with considerable skill: the dead are “hungry” and potentially dangerous; Maureen Stornaway is “furious”; the rector is initially sketched as “smug.” The story earns its consolations by acknowledging the grief and ambivalence that complicate all forms of communal belonging. The Host Commentary appended to the podcast transcript—a personal reflection by the host on growing up on the Isle of Man—both confirms and deepens this tonal register, suggesting that the story’s emotional truth is not invented but excavated from lived experience of small-island life and its discontents.
C. Characterization
Linden’s characterization operates across two registers: the broad strokes of the representative and the fine grain of the particular. The dead, as a collective protagonist, are necessarily generalized; they function as a chorus in the Greek theatrical sense, simultaneously commenting on and participating in the action. Their authority derives from their multiplicity—they are “all” of Tawlish’s dead—but their limitation derives from the same source: they cannot act, only watch and dream.
Within this chorus, Katie’s father is the most fully individuated dead character. His longing for his daughter—”he’d hoped to sing her lullabies”—and his brief, tender contact with her at the moment of departure establish the emotional ground of the story. His ignorance of Katie’s musical gifts, maintained to the very end (“He never hears her play”), is the story’s most economical use of its dramatic irony: the reader understands what the father does not, and the gap between his desire and his knowledge concentrates the story’s sadness without requiring explicit lamentation.
Maureen Stornaway is the story’s most complex living character. Her arc is one of gradual psychological adaptation: from furious attachment to Tawlish, through the bitterness of dispersal, to a grief that is not resolved but that becomes, eventually, portable. Her forgiveness of the mainland—precipitated not by philosophical reconciliation but by the visceral evidence of a baby resuscitated—is one of the story’s most quietly astute moments. Linden is careful to show that Maureen’s forgiveness does not erase her loss but rather places it in a context that renders survival possible.
The rector, initially presented as an antagonist—responsible for the evacuation, “smug,” taking nothing because he has a house on the mainland—is the story’s most surprising characterization. His secret compassion for Lizzie Knell, and the consequent collapse of his belief in sin, complicates the story’s implicit critique of mainland religious authority without sentimentalizing him into a redemption narrative. He remains, as the text acknowledges, imperfect and “not that well liked”—but he is also human, and the story honors that humanity without endorsing his structural role as the instrument of displacement.
IV. Historical, Cultural, and Theoretical Contexts
Historical Context
The parallels between Tawlish and the historical evacuation of St Kilda in August 1930 are multiple and specific. St Kilda’s final community of thirty-six residents—reduced by emigration, illness, and the deaths of young women in childbirth—petitioned the British government for resettlement; the island had no doctor, dwindling food resources, and an increasingly brackish relationship with modernity (Steel, 1975; National Trust for Scotland, 2022). Linden’s Tawlish replicates many of these features: thirty-seven residents, a “freshwater spring gone brackish,” no school, no doctor, and the critical presence of a rector who is “always a mainlander at heart.” The story does not claim historical fidelity—the author’s note identifies the story as drawing on personal and family experiences of migration rather than documentary research—but it draws on the affective and symbolic weight of the St Kildan precedent as part of a broader Atlantic island mythology.
This mythology encompasses multiple historical evacuations in addition to St Kilda, including those of Blasket Island off the Kerry coast (1953) and Bardsey Island; the Irish and Scottish Atlantic peripheral islands share a common cultural grammar of abandonment, maintained customs, and the slow dying of Gaelic or island-specific linguistic traditions. Linden’s engagement with this tradition is conscious and layered, evident in the specific material culture she inventories in the evacuation scene: “spoons, spindles, fish-hooks, balls of yarn. A clothes-peg doll in a twist of old apron. Seabirds’ eggs wrapped in blankets.” This inventory performs both documentary naturalism and elegiac catalog, echoing the mode of the Irish keening tradition in which the enumeration of the dead’s possessions constituted a form of lamentation.
Theoretical Context
The story engages productively with several theoretical frameworks beyond the historical. The concept of solastalgia, as developed by philosopher Glenn Albrecht from 2003 onwards, is particularly relevant (Albrecht, “Solastalgia: A New Concept in Human Health and Identity,” PAN, 2005). Where nostalgia concerns the pain of the displaced who long for a home they have left, solastalgia describes the distress of those whose home is being transformed around them—a condition experienced both by the Tawlish dead, whose island literally erodes, and by the living evacuees who carry in their bodies an island that no longer exists as they knew it. Linden’s earlier story “A Cure for Solastalgia” (Strange Horizons, 2024) makes this conceptual engagement explicit; “The Tawlish Island Songbook of the Dead” approaches the same territory through myth and metaphor rather than direct invocation.
The story also invites reading through the lens of diaspora theory, particularly the concept of “routes and roots” advanced by Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall in the context of Caribbean diasporic culture. Hall’s formulation of cultural identity as “not an essence but a positioning”—something produced through narrative rather than given by origins—speaks to Katie Zell’s anxiety about her own claim to Tawlish identity, her sense that her coal-dust accent disqualifies her (Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” 1990). Linden’s story quietly refutes this anxiety: the new songs stitched into the songbook are Katie’s songs, composed in diaspora, and they are accepted by the dead as genuine gifts, not as inferior substitutes. Cultural identity, the story argues, is not diminished by displacement but transformed and, in some respects, enriched by it.
The collective narrator also invites comparison with work in grief studies and what sociologist Tony Walter has called “continuing bonds theory”—the reconceptualization of mourning not as a process of severing ties with the dead but of maintaining them in transformed form (Walter, “A New Model of Grief,” Mortality 1.1, 1996). The dead of Tawlish are not asking to be transcended or mourned into absence; they are asking to be held in living memory, to continue to exist in the minds and songs of their descendants. The story’s resolution—songs sent across the threshold—constitutes precisely the “continuing bond” that grief theory identifies as psychologically healthy for the bereaved, but here enacted on behalf of the dead rather than the living.
V. Evaluation: Strengths and Weaknesses
Strengths
The story’s most substantial achievement is its narrative voice. The first-person-plural perspective of the collective dead is formally demanding, philosophically rich, and emotionally affecting; it requires sustained management throughout and Linden maintains it with admirable discipline, allowing only calibrated deviations for dramatic effect. The voice is distinctively the story’s own: it does not recall the collective narrators of Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides) or William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” in tone, though it shares their structural device. The Tawlish dead speak with the laconic pathos of a people who have always known scarcity, and this registers as culturally specific rather than universally elegiac.
The story’s structural economy is also remarkable. In approximately 3,700 words, Linden traces four generations of a community’s history without sacrificing emotional specificity for narrative breadth. The selection and sequencing of scenes is exceptionally efficient: the seaside scene with Maureen, the detail of the burned violin, the account of Katie’s academic and musical career, the rector’s secret compassion for Lizzie Knell—each of these advances multiple narrative and thematic strands simultaneously. Nothing is ornamental; every detail earns its place.
The treatment of grief, particularly Maureen’s solar metaphor, represents a significant artistic achievement. The image is original and precise without being ostentatious; it does what literary imagery should do, articulating something that prose argument cannot.
Finally, the story’s ending—”We’re dead; our people will never return. But one after the other, we sing”—achieves a resolution that is simultaneously consoling and honest. It does not pretend that loss is undone or that the dead are returned to life. It argues only that singing is possible, that identity can be recovered even at the threshold of dissolution. This is a modest consolation in terms of narrative event, but it is richly earned and emotionally sufficient.
Weaknesses
The story’s weaknesses are minor relative to its achievements, but they bear acknowledgment. The rector’s transformation from narrative antagonist to moral exemplar, while thematically useful, is accomplished somewhat abruptly. The revelation of his compassion for Lizzie Knell and his consequent loss of belief in sin arrives without sufficient narrative preparation, and the shift in register—from satirical sketch to quietly moving character study—is not entirely smooth. A story with more space might have allowed this arc to develop more gradually.
Additionally, some readers may find the story’s implicit theology—its cheerful acceptance of a world in which the dead genuinely inhabit the island and genuinely receive gifts through fire—demands more commitment to its own system than the narrative fully provides. The “rules” of the story’s ghostly ontology (the dead cannot cross salt; fire transfers objects; dreams cross the strait) are suggestive rather than elaborated, and moments where the system seems to be applied selectively (the dead’s interaction with the young man who returns is more tactile than their other interactions would suggest possible) may produce momentary readerly uncertainty.
These are, however, the weaknesses of a story operating at the ambitious end of its form’s range—a flash of complication in a work that is, by the standards of short speculative fiction, genuinely distinguished.
VI. Conclusion
“The Tawlish Island Songbook of the Dead” establishes E.M. Linden as a writer of significant accomplishment within contemporary literary speculative fiction. The story’s central argument—that cultural identity is sustained not by the preservation of origins but by the continuous, generative act of transmission across rupture—is made not as a thesis but as a felt experience, through a narrative voice and formal structure that enact what they describe. The weft-and-warp metaphor that governs the story’s symbolic landscape is realized in the story’s own construction: its multiple narrative strands, its temporal braiding, its movement between the living and the dead, constitute precisely the kind of weaving it celebrates.
The story earns its place within the tradition of Atlantic island-evacuation literature while transcending documentary or nostalgic constraint. It is not a lament for a world destroyed but a meditation on how communities survive destruction—not intact but transformed, not in the same place but in new songs, in the bodies and accents of descendants, in books burned and received across thresholds the living cannot see. As such, it speaks to conditions far broader than the Scottish or Irish Atlantic periphery: to any community whose cultural archive has been scattered by displacement, whose dead have been left behind, whose descendants carry identities they do not know how to claim.
For future scholarship, the story rewards comparative reading alongside works such as Seamus Heaney’s bog-land elegies, the poetry of Sorley MacLean on the Highland Clearances, and contemporary speculative fiction by writers such as Premee Mohamed and Sofia Samatar, who similarly employ fantastic estrangement to explore colonial and diasporic trauma. It would also profit from reading in relation to the growing body of ecocritical scholarship on Atlantic island cultures and the literary representation of environmental dispossession. What is clear, even from this first encounter, is that “The Tawlish Island Songbook of the Dead” is a story that bears—that rewards—reading more than once.
Works Cited
Albrecht, Glenn. “‘Solastalgia’: A New Concept in Human Health and Identity.” PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature, vol. 3, 2005, pp. 41–55.
Albrecht, Glenn, et al. “Solastalgia: The Distress Caused by Environmental Change.” Australasian Psychiatry, vol. 15, supplement 1, 2007, pp. S95–S98.
Assmann, Aleida. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives. Cambridge UP, 2011.
Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford, Lawrence & Wishart, 1990, pp. 222–237.
Linden, E.M. “A Cure for Solastalgia.” Strange Horizons, 1 Jan. 2024, strangehorizons.com.
—. “The Tawlish Island Songbook of the Dead.” PodCastle, no. 879, 2025.
National Trust for Scotland. “St Kilda: The Evacuation of a Community.” nts.org.uk, 5 Aug. 2022.
Steel, Tom. The Life and Death of St. Kilda: The Moving Story of a Vanished Island Community. Fontana/Collins, 1975.
Vansina, Jan. Oral Tradition as History. U of Wisconsin P, 1985.
Walter, Tony. “A New Model of Grief: Bereavement and Biography.” Mortality, vol. 1, no. 1, 1996, pp. 7–25.