Although the cover of the first publication is subtitled "A Novel", with its publisher describing it as a "verse-novel", it is possible that this may be more accurately categorized as a novella. The publisher's description states that "Deep Wheel Orcadia is a magical first: a science-fiction verse-novel written in the Orkney dialect. This unique adventure in minority language poetry comes with a parallel translation into playful and vivid English, so the reader will miss no nuance of the original." On the presumption that the reported 176 page count is split evenly between the Orkney and English versions, it seems likely that the English text alone comes to less than 40,000 words.
