'What did you see?'
'Nothing. An empty, ordinary room, with a hissing gas fire. But I was overwhelmed with this terrible feeling of dread - dread of something . . . something as guileless as a child and as ancient as sin.'
In a post-war Britain grieving the horrors of WWII, a young curate is called to an unassuming terrace house. There is something inside: something that terrifies the residents to the point of silence, something urgent and desperate to be seen. Unnerved, he nevertheless brushes off this brief and startling encounter with the unexplained. But the neighbour, Father Bly, seems profoundly affected by this reckoning: panic-stricken, he flees.
Forty years later, Bly tends a bleak parish and dwindling flock on a windswept Scottish island - isolated and undisturbed. Until a stranger shows up, and brings the past snapping at his heels . . .
The Unwelcome Guest is a nostalgic, emotionally sweeping story about long-buried secrets and our inability to outrun the past, spanning from village life in the 1940s to the 1980s Highlands, from the beloved Reverend Richard Coles.