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. She survives an air-crash over the Kunlun Shan mountains, 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 attack a mine and free 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. There is no way they can make contact with the RW people inside the old nuclear reactor. They encounter the twins again. From them they learn that there is a time-slip at a place on the Tarim River: water is being pumped from the past. That’s how the Neanderthals wandered in. Also, the twins are able to tell Hsien that he’s a chimera, so his heat sense (and the consequent need to blind him) isn’t heritable.

They set off back to the Kunlun Shan mountains to tell the Neanderthals that they’ve found their way home. Staying in Tibetan refugee lamaseries, Hsien learns, and keeps to himself, that the resin used to blind him is likely to kill him in his forties.

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. It taks Rongye nearly two years to reach the Xinjiang side of the Kunlun Shan, but eventually she joins up with the brigands, and Raggle himself turns up to take her to the Neanderthal’s secret valley deep in the mountains. Beatrice, Hsien and Bill get there just before her. Bill is relieved to find that the Neanderthal girl Derriakin (Derry) has had a normal child with her Tibetan partner, but he is nevertheless disturbed to see that they’re expecting another, though he can’t pin down his concerns.

A date for your diary:  the final chapter, Chapter 11, will be podcast on 6 June 2013.

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