Piping Hot

Steven Lindsay, a university lecturer, is suddenly released from a Soviet labour camp after serving only part of a sentence for what he suspects were false charges.

His homecoming is not what he anticipated: he has little prospect of employment; his wife Jill has moved the family from Glasgow to a Fife village, where she is working as a librarian; his sons Alan and Gregor are no longer in private education, but are attending a comprehensive school and have become teenagers with their own ideas on careers and hobbies.

When Steven starts to catch up with the lost years, he finds that two other men have had an influence on his family: Duncan Mackenzie, the village joiner and pipe major and Paul Holland, a Czech refugee who teaches locally and who, at times, seems vaguely familiar.

The Lindsays gradually settle down together again and bit by bit, discover the reasons for Steven's imprisonment. Matters eventually come to a head at the annual Cowal Highland Games at Dunoon.