"It's a psychological thriller masquerading as a slice of true crime; a collection of 'found' documents that play lovingly with the traditions of Scottish literature; an artful portrait of a remote crofting community in the 19th century that showcases contemporary theories about class and criminology," Jordan wrote.
His Bloody Project, Graeme Macrae Burnet's tale of murder in a remote Highland crofting community in the 19th century, is leading sales of shortlisted books by a significant margin, according to the most recent figures available.
When I met Gabriella Coleman in Edinburgh she'd spent the previous evening meeting one of her contacts, who lived in a remote croft in the Scottish countryside.
And in the 1950s, a teenage John Lennon spent a summer holiday in a remote croft overlooking Durness's Sango Bay, an experience that spurred him to write In My Life with Paul McCartney in 1965: the Beatles song was part-inspired by a poem about the area that Lennon wrote during his time there.
Graeme Macrae Burnet's entertaining His Bloody Project (Saraband £8.99) tells of a brutal triple murder in a remote northwestern crofting community in 1869, while Madeleine Thien's Do Not Say We Have Nothing (Granta £12.99) is a wide-ranging family saga about history, music and art.
This remote campsite on the western coast of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides is owned by the villagers of the Cnip crofting community.
Crofting (small-scale tenant farming) is widespread in the north.
Nonni is about to depart for America with a stranger, leaving forever the remote, icy croft that has been his lair and his polestar.
Although grandparenting hasn't taken over our lives, Steve and I do occasionally fantasise about moving to a remote Scottish croft.
An opinionated friend suggested that my approach was the exact wrong one; I should read something "cold and northern" while in Miami, he said, such as "Independent People" by Halldór Laxness, a five-hundred-page novel about the life of a sheep farmer on a remote Icelandic croft.
