The Spuddy

Description

He was a grey-black mongrel; tough canny, loyal - and abandoned. The fisherman called him The Spuddy. The only person to care for The Spuddy in the busy Hebridean village of Gaymal is Andy, a young mute boy staying in the town with relatives. For both of them, their meeting brings friendship after loneliness; but when the new companions are taken up by Jake, skipper of the Silver Crest, events take a swift and unexpected turn. This moving, surprising story will warm the hearts of the many admirers of Lillian Beckwith's Hebridean stories and win her new friends.

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.