Green Hand

Description

The life of a fisherman is a hard one. `Mondays to Fridays he takes his boat to sea, Saturdays he takes his thirst to a pub, and Sundays he takes his wife to bed. And by God, by the time Monday morning's come around his wife is that sick of him that she's as pleased as the seagulls to get him off to see again.' David Jones did not take long to see the reason why. A climbing holiday brought David Jones to the West Coast of Scotland. Chance, or was it fate, introduced him to Donald. The days, which grew into weeks, that he spent fishing for lobster and herring were unlike any that he had ever known before, and as he progresses from being a `Green Hand' to a practised fisherman, he finds the change from his strict chapel-going home in Wales to this new world of the `Hairy Wullies', the scalders and the dominating figure of King Herring both stimulating and hilarious. `Fans will rush to snap up her latest novel' Sunday Post

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.