Book review: The Endless Beach, by Jenny Colgan

I have to confess that I wasn’t looking forward to The Endless Beach. Jenny Colgan may have legions of fans, but after reading an early work of hers years ago, I’d pretty much decided that I wasn’t one of them. Then there is the issue of novels about small Scottish communities, written by people who don’t live in them. Too often, the result is an anthropological study of quaint eccentrics, detailed for the amusement of outsiders. Fortunately, however, Colgan’s characters are too well drafted to put any real island commmunity’s back up.