'Clear' by Carys Davies
- Reed
- Sep 2
- 2 min read
Author: Carys Davies
Rating: A
Vibe: Windswept Scottish islands, forbidden attraction, and the slow burn of learning each other's hearts
I wasn't expecting to fall in love with Clear. The premise sounded almost academic, a Scottish minister sent to evict the last inhabitant of a remote island in 1843, set against the brutal Highland Clearances. What I found instead was one of the most tender and authentic queer love stories I've read in years—a book that understands how attraction builds not just through glances and touches, but through the vulnerable work of trying to understand another person's world.
John Ferguson needs money. His decision to join the breakaway Free Church of Scotland has left him and his wife Mary struggling financially, so when he's offered a job clearing the final tenant from a desolate island between Shetland and Norway, he takes it. The job should be simple— deliver an eviction notice to Ivar, the island's sole inhabitant, and wait for the boat to take him away. But when John falls from a cliff during his first day on the island, everything changes. Ivar saves his life, nurses him back to health, and suddenly John finds himself learning not just to survive on this harsh landscape, but to see it—and the man who calls it home—with entirely different eyes.
Davies writes with the kind of restraint that makes every gesture feel enormous. The two men don't share a language—Ivar speaks Norn, an extinct dialect of the Scottish islands—so their growing connection unfolds through borrowed words, careful pantomime, and the slow accumulation of understanding. John begins documenting Ivar's vocabulary, creating a dictionary of wind and weather, of stone and sea. But what he's really mapping is intimacy and the way two people learn to communicate not just meaning, but care.
What makes this book extraordinary is how earned everything feels. Their attraction doesn't happen despite John's original mission, but because of the moral complexity it creates. John is genuinely torn apart by what he's been asked to do, and that internal conflict—the way duty battles with something deeper he can barely name—feels completely authentic. These aren't modern men stumbling into self-awareness; they're 1840s men moving carefully toward something they don't fully understand but can't resist.
For gay men, there's something particularly powerful about watching these characters navigate attraction across difference. The language barrier becomes a perfect metaphor for the way gay love often requires its own translation—finding ways to communicate desire and care that exist outside conventional scripts. John's growing fluency in Norn mirrors his growing comfort with feelings he doesn't have words for in any language.
The ending is stunning. I won't spoil it, but Davies sticks the landing with a resolution that's both surprising and inevitable, one that honors the complexity of everything that came before. Days later, I'm still thinking about the final pages, still marveling at how she managed to write something that feels both historically grounded and utterly hopeful.
Clear is that rare book that trusts its readers to understand that the most radical act isn't always rebellion—sometimes it's simply choosing to see another person clearly. In fewer than 150 pages, Davies has written an epic about intimacy, a love story that understands how connection happens: slowly, carefully, one translated word at a time.
