Braken Fences, Wolf Kurtoglu’s first novel, has been described as ‘masterful’ (the Blether Region) and ‘the best novel written in Scots in recent times’ (Rab Wilson, Lallans). You can now enjoy listening to this ‘epic tale with believable characters’ in a year long series of exclusive fortnightly podcasts.

The story so far: Beatrice Varshini is returning from a posting deep within the Fundamentalist Zone (FZ), where the Rational World (RW) maintains an old nuclear reactor at Nilyulgun in the Tien Shan. She survives an air-crash on the ither side of the Taklamakan Desert, along with Bill Henderson. Beatrice taks up with a band of brigands, and finds herself an object of interest both to Hsien, a Chinese man who was blinded as a child to accommodate his genetically engineered ability to see heat, and a Neanderthal, Ragoran (Raggle). Raggle’s version of their past is told as if they had stepped out of prehistory, not out of a genetics lab.

Hsien helps two boys to escape the general slaughter when the brigands attacks a mine and frees Bill and others enslaved there. The boys, Wu-Yun and Bai-Yun, are the twin sons of the mining engineer, whom Bill had become friendly with. Because of this, Hsien gets flung out of the band of brigands. Beatrice (now expecting Hsien’s baby) and Bill stay with him. Bill takes to drink, and frets about what has happened to Nusiret. Nusiret was another slave in the mine, a Uigher girl in disguise as a man, and part of a conspiracy to spread a contraceptive weed among women oppressed by fundamentalism.

Bill, Beatrice and Hsien, with the baby boy Ren, go on the road as hawkers. A year and a half later, they reach the site of the old nuclear reactor, but there is no way they can make contact with the RW people inside. They come across traces of Nusiret in the shape of the contraceptive weed. They find the Tarim River tributaries dry, and water being pumped into the Tarim’s bed. At the pumping station they encounter Wu-Yun and Bai-Yun. From them they learn that there is a time-slip at that place: the water is coming from the past, and sometimes a mammoth gets in. That’s how the Neanderthals wandered in as well. Also, the twins able to tell Hsien that he’s a chimera, so his heat sense (and the consequent need to blind him) isn’t heritable.

Back in Delhi, Beatrice’s grandfather, thinking she’s dead, is persuaded by Guangwu Bang’s shady Tibetan refugee network to donate her identity to his protegée Rongye, an illegal Tibetan immigrant. Word gets back to Rongye that a woman survived the air-crash, and she sets off across Tibet in the hope that it might be Beatrice. Beatrice’s grandfather goes with her as far as Lhasa.

A date for your diary:  the second part of Chapter 10 will be podcast on 23 May 2013.

Wulf has a blog here where you can find further information about the novel. The novel can be bought here.