Sunset Song

Description

Twice Voted Scotland's Favourite Book Faced with a choice between a harsh farming life and the world of books and learning, Chris Guthrie chooses to remain in her rural community, bound by her intense love of the land. But everything changes with the arrival of the First World War and Chris finds her land altered beyond recognition. In lyrical prose, Sunset Song evokes village life in the early twentieth century and offers a powerful portrait of a land and people in turmoil.

Lewis Grassic Gibbon (1901-35) is the pen-name of James Leslie Mitchell. Born and brought up in the rich farming land of North East Scotland, he was a prolific writer of novels, short stories and essays and had seventeen full-length books published before his untimely death at the age of thirty-three. He is today recognised as one of the outstanding figures in Scottish literature, most famous for A Scots Quair, the trilogy of novels which begins with Sunset Song.

Sunset Song's great gripping hybrid of melodrama and realism . . . left me scorched -- ALI SMITH If this new edition is prompting you to re-read Sunset Song after many years, as I have just done, you will find it has lost none of its appeal and emotion. And if you are about to read this remarkable novel for the first time, you are embarking on a profound journey -- NICOLA STURGEON Portrayed with a lyrical intensity that echoes through the years and still resonates today * * New York Times * * An unforgettable evocation of a way of life that has slipped away . . . It is a love song for a landscape and language still familiar - and precious - to a generation born long after [Grassic-Gibbon] died . . . Chris is one of the great women of 20th-century fiction * * Guardian * * Chris Guthrie is the most passionate and appealing heroine in Scottish literature; Grassic Gibbon's magnificent novel is fresh, powerful and timeless -- ANNE DONOVAN It is gritty and passionate and one of Scotland's great 20th-century novels * * Daily Express * * When I read Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song in my mid-teens I entered into it with such wholehearted love that I longed to live inside it . . . The rhythms of the prose are incantatory, musical . . . Chris is the centre of the novel and its genius, vivid on every page where she's present -- TESSA HADLEY * * Guardian * * An inescapable landmark of Scottish literature . . . Few novels have ever achieved such an unaffectedly sublime blend of poetry and music, and it is clear from the outset that the title is anything but a conceit. The prose is increasingly symphonic, in its sweep and surge, but the final effect is more like what bagpipers call ceol mor, "big music". It is full of haunting echoes of traditional Scottish balladry * * Times Literary Supplement * * His three great novels have the impetus and music of mountain burns in full spate * * Observer * * An evocative look at female life on the Scottish frontier . . . Sunset Song is the story of a resilient young woman during the early 20th century. Her profound identification with the land is her source of renewal and strength as she endures harrowing family circumstances and, eventually, the devastating fallout of the First World War * * Los Angeles Times * *