Braken Fences, Wolf Kurtoglus 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). Raggles 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. Because of this, Hsien gets flung out of the band of brigands. Beatrice (now expecting Hsiens 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 lad, 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. They learn that there was a time-slip at a place on the Tarim River: water is being pumped from the past. Thats how the Neanderthals wandered in. They set off back to the Kunlun Shan mountains to tell the Neanderthals that theyve found their way home.

Back in Delhi, Beatrices grandfather, thinking shes dead, is persuaded by Guangwu Bangs shady Tibetan refugee network to donate her identity to his protege 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. Beatrices grandfather goes with her as far as Lhasa. Rongye eventually joins up with the brigands, and Raggle himself takes her to the Neanderthals secret valley deep in the mountains. Hsien, knowing that the resin used to blind him is likely to kill him in his forties, makes Raggle an offer: since theyre like brothers, they can share a wife. Raggle is torn between going to the RW with them, or back to the world of the Neanderthals.

The Neanderthal girl Derriakin (Derry) has a second child with her Tibetan partner, and Rongye recognises that there is a Rh-negative problem.

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