Beautiful Just!

Description

`. . . in Bruach when a single woman or a widow owns a net which is borrowed for the fishing that woman is entitled to a share of the catch and there came a day when, my net having been borrowed and the herring having obligingly swum into it, I found myself the recipient of a whole creelful of fresh fish.' The Hebridean island of Bruach provides the setting for more enchanting tales of life among the crofters. Rich in incident and humour, Beautiful Just! sees Lililan Beckwith at the top of her form. `This is crofting life at its strenuous best . . . masterly story-telling.' Press and Journal `hilarious' Sunday Times `absorbing . . . its humour is happy, easy and natural.' Daily Mirror

Lilian Comber wrote fiction and non-fiction for both adults and children under the pseudonym Lillian Beckwith. She is best known for her series of comic novels based on her time living on a croft in the Scottish Hebrides. Beckwith was born in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, in 1916, where her father ran a grocery shop. The shop provided the background for her memoir About My Father's Business, a child's eye view of a 1920s family. She moved to the Isle of Skye with her husband in 1942, and began writing fiction after moving to the Isle of Man with her family twenty years later. She also completed a cookery book, Secrets from a Crofter's Kitchen (Arrow, 1976). Since her death, Beckwith's novel A Shine of Rainbows has been made into a film starring Aidan Quinn and Connie Nielsen, which in 2009 won 'Best Feature' awards at the Heartland and Chicago Children's Film Festivals.