A Scots Quair
The Mearns Trilogy
by Lewis Grassic Gibbon
£12.99
- Paperback
- E-Book
854 in stock
Classic fiction
Reviews
Sunset Song is my favourite book of all time
Nicola Sturgeon MSP, First Minister of Scotland
One of the five best Scottish novels of all times
The Wall Street Journal
I've just re-read Sunset Song, and its great gripping hybrid of melodrama and realism has left me scorched ... Grassic Gibbon's language in the Quair freed me to think language could do anything and everything, could be poetic and realist and dark and soaring and local and strange all at once, with sentences longer than breath; but still all about breathing, or how the heart works
Ali Smith
The book and their heroine deserve their place in history. There is no better description of the way all these young men from small villages went off to fight in a war, which most of them didn’t understand, and from which so many never returned. That is one of the reasons it carries so much resonance… he [Grassic Gibbon] was responsible for creating a masterpiece which will live forever
Vivien Heilbron
Chris Guthrie is one of the great women of 20th century fiction ... he [Grassic Gibbon] portrays the cataclysmic impact of the war on a generation and their expectations ... Sunset Song is a lament – and a cry of anger, too
The Guardian
Sunset Song is regularly voted Scotland’s favourite book in public polls, is acclaimed across the world, and remains the most evocative work ever written about the Mearns
Press & Journal
That flinty Scottish wit – which I experienced first in the books and later recognised when I studied there – flies off the pages in dark sparks
Independent
About the Book
A Scots Quair is revolutionary - innovative in its form, deft and humorous in its use of the Scots language, courageous in its characterisation and politics. Central to the trilogy is Chris Guthrie, one of the most remarkable female characters in modern literature. In Sunset song, Gibbon's finest achievement, the reader follows Chris through her girlhood in a tight-knit Scottish farming community: the seasons, the weddings, the funerals, the grind of work, the gossip. As the Great War takes its toll, machines repalce the old way of life.
Cloud Howe and Grey Granite take Chris from her rural homeland to life in an industrial Scotland and hte desperate years of the Depression. The triology as a whole is a major achievment, a picture of society undergoing traumatic and far-reaching transformation. Always readable, never sentimental, A Scots Quair is one of the most important works of Scottish literature.
The Author
Lewis Grassic Gibbon
Lewis Grassic Gibbon (James Leslie Mitchell) was one of the finest writers of the twentieth century. Born in Aberdeenshire in 1901, he died at the age of thirty-four. He was a prolific writer of novels, short stories, essays and science fiction, and his writing reflected his wide interest in religion, archaeology, history, politics and science. The Mearns trilogy, A Scots Quair, is his most renowned work, and has become a landmark in Scottish literature.Related
-
Paperback | Pub: 17 Jul 2007£8.99
Sick Heart River is John Buchan’s most powerful novel and his last, completed days before his death. It was published posthumously in 1941. Buchan’s rich descriptions of the rugged Canadian Northwest Territories are influenced by his...
-
Paperback | Pub: 29 Jun 2010£8.99A long-forgotten promise made by Richard Hannay finds him honour-bound to resolve a violent vendetta in which the lives of a young father and his daughter are in danger from unscrupulous and desperate men. Hannay sets out on a high-octane chase from...
-
Paperback | Pub: 06 Feb 2020£8.99
The turbulent ‘Killing Times’ of the Covenanters is the backdrop to a desperate struggle between lifelong rivals. John Burnet of Barns, the last of an ancient line of Border Reivers, returns home from abroad to find himself denounced as...
