Joseph Knight (novel)

Plot introduction

Reception

• Ali Smith writing in The Guardian concludes "A gift for witty re-imagining and a canny understanding of the novelistic and its conduits to the worlds we live in now mark Robertson as a marvellous novelist and Joseph Knight as a work of cunning and great assurance, one which directly tackles its historic Scottish guilt and also, by implication, a wider, more contemporary guilt: the loss of freedom that imperialism means for both its victims and its winners."
• Will Cohu in The Telegraph writes "Joseph Knight is a book of such quality as to persuade you that historical novels are the true business of the writer, that it's through the past that we might understand ourselves best, that it's in the past that the imagination can be most free, but also most authentic...Joseph Knight is an enquiry into the defining quality of freedom. Joseph's case strikes a chord with many others in the book – colliers, wives, daughters – who long for liberty. Knight, who ends his days down a coalmine, comes to realise that to be free is not necessarily to be content, but to have the choice to possess wholly what life one has – "It might not be much, life, but he wanted it all the same, all he could get of it" – rather than to long for death as the only hope of emancipation."