Reviews
George Mackay Brown is one of the masters of the short story form'
Ali Smith
About the Book
"The Island of the Women" is George Mackay Brown's posthumously published collection of short stories, released in 1998, two years after the author's death. Like his previous collections, "A Time to Keep" and "A Calendar of Love", this volume explores Brown's concerns with history, spirituality, legend and storytelling. In the title story, Brown uses the famous Orcadian myth of the selkie, the seal-man. The story "Poet and Prince: A Fable", explores the role of the writer in society, a tale which begins in an unknown European state and concludes on Brown's beloved island.
The Author
George Mackay Brown
George Mackay Brown (1921–96) was one of the twentieth century’s most distinguished and original writers. His lifelong inspiration and birthplace, Stromness in Orkney, moulded his view of the world, though he studied in Edinburgh and later at Newbattle Abbey College. In 1941 he was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis and lived an increasingly reclusive life in Stromness, but he produced a regular stream of publications from 1954 onwards. These included A Calendar of Love (1967), A Time to Keep (1969), Greenvoe (1972), Hawkfall (1974), and, notably, the novel Beside the Ocean of Time (1994), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Saltire Book of the Year.Related
-
E-Book | Pub: 01 Jun 2011£4.99A young girl is kidnapped and taken through the desert to an isolated mountain brothel. Two thousand years later, after a suspicious landslide near Lanzhou, a low-level bureaucrat searches for a missing colleague. A thirteenthcentury Franciscan...
-
Paperback | Pub: 29 Jun 2010£8.99After distinguished service in the First World War, Richard Hannay settles into peaceful domesticity with his wife Mary and their young son. However, news comes to him of three kidnappings. With no more than a few tantalisingly cryptic lines of...
-
Paperback | Pub: 17 May 2011£7.99After a bike crash in a foggy Edinburgh, troubled young actor Robert Lewis wakes to find that life has changed for the darker. And the weirder. He’s still a deceitful egoist but now life seems to be deceiving and manipulating him. Everything...
-
Paperback | Pub: 07 Jun 2005£8.99Vinland follows the turbulent life of Ranald Sigmundson, a young boy born into the Dark Ages when Orkney was torn between its Viking past and its Christian future. Struggling to understand the conflicts of his home, Ranald seeks adventure and...
