Hovel

In this debut novel, a young woman in the Rocky Mountains, separated from the ancestral rhythms of her home in Scotland, turns to ancient rituals to find solace and connection. With shades of Olga Tokarczuk, Ali Smith, and Rachel Cusk, Hovel is a book for those fascinated by female interiority.
Homesickness takes many forms. Alone in the mountains because of her husband’s job, occupied by little more than online video captioning she calls “kitten work,” our narrator becomes fascinated by the not-long-gone life of her Scottish ancestors, a time when the lamplighter took the night off for the full moon, girls bathed their faces in morning dew, and people sang to the seals.
Her husband, however, is unsure of the emotional efficacy of cooking by candlelight, peeing in the woods, and writing vexed letters to the mayor about the birds living in the doomed aspens behind their apartment building. Especially because the letters are being read, out loud, at the town meetings attended by unimpressed neighbours. But our narrator is bewitched by the liminality of memory.
In a novel of compelling poetic precision and depth, Ross captures the lengths we go to for connection when we’re alone, following threads of personal history and fascination to conclusions one can only reach when there’s too much time on one’s hands and it’s too cold to go outside.

AILSA ROSS writes about people, place, and art for Outside, The Guardian, the BBC, Longreads, National Geographic Traveler, JSTOR Daily, ARTnews, Orion, the Writers’ Union of Canada, and many others. Her work’s been syndicated by Cambridge University Press.
In the autumn of 2019, with the Writers’ Trust of Canada, she was the writer-in-residence at Berton House in the Yukon. In 2022, she was an artist-in-residence in Jasper National Park. In 2018 she was a Banff Centre resident of the Mountain and Wilderness Writing program under the Carlyle Norman Scholarship. Her research and creative writing has also been supported by the British Council, Orion Environmental Writers Workshop in Arizona, NES Artist Residency in Iceland, Outlandia in Scotland, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Canada Council for the Arts.
A graduate of the University of Edinburgh’s law school, Ross does freelance fact-checking for various clients, including Harper’s and Harper’s Bazaar. She’s worked in communications for environmental nonprofits like the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative—which is how she became obsessed with writing about animals.
Ailsa grew up in the north of Scotland. She lives in the Canadian Badlands.