Daniel Shand

Daniel Shand is a Scottish novelist whose work examines vulnerable characters through spare dialogue, uneasy family relationships, and precisely observed settings. Crocodile, published by Sandstone Press in 2018, follows eleven-year-old Chloe when she is sent to stay with her grandparents while her mother is unwell. Bored, resentful, and uncertain about the explanations given to her, Chloe tries to understand local children, remembered family stories, and threats that may be imagined or real. Shand keeps the narrative close to her shifting judgments, allowing ordinary summer spaces to acquire menace without reducing the people around her to simple heroes or villains. Crocodile followed his debut Fallow, winner of the Betty Trask Prize, and preceded Model Citizens. The novel develops his interest in abandonment and unstable trust from a child’s distinctive perspective. Its title evokes the lurking danger Chloe anticipates, while the book’s deeper tension comes from her gradual recognition that vulnerability can exist inside families as well as beyond them.