A shy man leads a solitary existence until a young girl – and a cat – inveigle their way into his apparently contented life in this big-hearted tale

All Jack Paton ever wanted was to be a famous country singer, but somehow it never happened. Certainly, the odds were stacked against him: cripplingly shy, no self-confidence. And although he considers it “a landscape of country music”, it can’t have helped matters that he was born in one of the more windswept corners of Shetland, far from Texas or Tennessee, and has remained there ever since, keeping his dreams to himself.

That Beautiful Atlantic Waltz, Malachy Tallack’s second novel, follows Jack, now approaching his 63rd birthday, as he spends his days pottering about in the cottage he has lived in since he was a child, listening to music, playing guitar and thinking of the past. The narrative flicks between Jack in the present, as he begins to question his life choices, and his parents, Sonny and Kathleen, decades earlier, as they toil in the island’s whaling industry and build the house Jack will later inherit. Like Tallack’s previous novel, The Valley at the Centre of the World, which also focused on life on these isolated islands, the pace is subdued and the action limited. So much so that Jack’s life is thrown into turmoil, and the gentle plot set in motion, by the discovery of an abandoned kitten on his doorstep.