BOOKS: We may know little of Scotland�s inhabitants 8000 years ago, but Margaret Elphinstone was still determined to create an authentic portrait of the period in her latest novel. By Rebecca McQuillan

It must have been demanding, and often cold, but we have very little hard evidence for what life was like in Scotland during the Mesolithic era. "We have no voices from that period," says the novelist Margaret Elphinstone. "We know they were there, from the microliths small stone tools and traces of disturbed soil via post holes, but there's very little expression of the people." Compare that to the late Middle Ages, say, or even the Neolithic, the most celebrated era of Scotland's prehistory from which great stone monuments such as the Ring of Brodgar survive, and the paucity of evidence from the Mesolithic, or Middle Stone Age (roughly 10,000 to 4000 years ago) is still more stark.

So setting a novel in that era, especially when you are a writer who takes seriously the need for accuracy and authenticity, is no mean feat. Yet that is what Elphinstone has done with her seventh novel, The Gathering Night, set around 8000 years ago among hunter-gatherer peoples in Highland Scotland. Elphinstone uses what we know, but builds upon it by considering Mesolithic evidence from other countries, especially southern Sweden and Denmark, and drawing parallels with other hunter-gatherer societies, both ancient and modern, including the Inuit and the Bushmen of the Kalahari.

The result is a meticulously detailed re-enactment of what life may well have been like in Mesolithic Scotland - thought to be the first such Scottish novel to be set in that period. It is the story of a family who lose their grown-up son, Bakar, when he goes out hunting one day and never returns. When they meet the extended members of their clan at their summer island camp, a man from another tribe appears, claiming to have fled a great wave. He joins the family, but his arrival unleashes jealousies, suspicion and division among the previously harmonious Auk people.

It's a wild May afternoon when we meet, in the Galloway village Elphinstone and her partner moved to last year after she retired as professor of creative writing at Strathclyde University (she is still an emeritus professor of English studies). Her own house is being renovated, so we chat in a neighbour's home. Looking out of the window at the unpredictable weather, she observes that she'd probably be dead if she had to live as Mesolithic people did. "If you and I were told we had to go camping for the rest of our lives, we'd be horrified," she says with a smile as we watch the rain against the glass. "But this is the world as it exists for them. You're going to have your child in a tent, because a tent is what there is."

The book is set in the wake of one of the most dramatic and devastating events ever to have touched Scotland: a tsunami caused by an underwater landslip off Norway. The colossal wave forced the migration of survivors whose lands had been washed away.

Elphinstone, an energetic and ravenously curious person, spent two years reading archaeological reports and going to digs, closely questioning deer stalkers, sailing between the Hebridean islands and trying her hand at those skills that survive from the Mesolithic age, or have been revived, such as flint knapping. She even made a coracle, a small rounded boat, using willow, hazel and a cow skin, at a coracle-making centre in Shropshire; it is now propped up in her garage. She has also drawn on her personal interests, especially in terms of locations, having travelled extensively in Scotland and the north Atlantic.

Of course, the vast majority of readers would be none the wiser if Elphinstone were to cut a few corners with the research. But that is not her way. "Authenticity to me is really important," she says. "I think that now a historical novel has more responsibility than ever because it's how people are getting their history. As a novelist, the genre says you're allowed to make certain things up, but to me, you're not allowed to make up the history any more than the historian is."

But when the history is only partially written, highly educated guesses must be made. Elphinstone carefully weighed each description of everyday life and ritual practice. For instance, cemeteries have been found in Sweden, but nothing in Scotland. "How do you account for the fact that there is no evidence of burials? Perhaps they had a different way of disposing of their dead as many hunter-gatherer peoples did. My people leave them out on platforms, which is a Native American practice. Of course, it's speculation, but to me it's really important that it's not impossible."

She observes that "all hunter-gatherer peoples had some sort of shamanistic practice", in which members of the community communicate with the spirit world, particularly animal spirits. So she has created Mesolithic shamans called Go-Betweens. "The other role of the shaman is as healer and as keeping the social balance and dealing with problems within the community."

She also paints a picture of a highly egalitarian society where men's work and women's work are strictly delineated, but the sexes are interdependent. Perhaps the greatest challenge, though, was creating plausible language, dialogue and names.

"There's not a single word coming out of that culture to us, just a few artefacts," she says. "Obviously, I'm writing in 21st-century English. So you're trying to make our language fit what you think these people were like. So many of our flower names arise from a specific Anglo-Saxon culture. You can't talk about cow parsley, horsetails or Good King Henry. We talk about wildcats, but they wouldn't have called them wildcats