Synopses & Reviews
Chris Guthrie and her son, Ewan, have come to the industrial town of Duncairn, where life is as hard as the granite of the buildings all around them. These are the Depression years of the 1930s, and Chris is far from the fields of her youth in Sunset Song. In a society of factory owners, shopkeepers, policemen, petty clerks, and industrial laborers, "Chris Caledonia" must make her living as best she can by working in Ma Cleghorns boarding house. Ewan finds employment in a steel foundry and tries to lead a peaceful strike against the manufacture of armaments. In the face of violence and police brutality, his socialist idealism is forged into something harder and fiercer as he becomes a communist activist ready to sacrifice himself, his girlfriend, and even the truth itself, for the cause. Grey Granite is the last and grimmest volume of the Scots Quair trilogy. Chris Guthrie is one of the great characters in Scottish literature and no reader of Sunset Song and Cloud Howe should miss this last rich chapter in her tale. Introduced by Tom Crawford.
Synopsis
This is the first comprehensive anthology of short works from one of Scotland's favorite novelists. Illustrating Grassic Gibbon's full range of work -- with stories and poems, essays and polemics -- this collection juxtaposes the diverse range of Gibbon's literary personae.
Synopsis
This selection of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's writing brings together old favourites and new material for the first time. There are all his lively contributions to Scottish Scene (co-written by Hugh MacDiarmid) including the unforgettable lilt and flow of his short stories 'Smeddum', 'Clay', 'Greendenn', 'Sim' and 'Forsaken'. The anthology ends with the full text of his last novel, The Speak of the Mearns, unpublished in his lifetime.
Valentina Bold has also included a collection of poems, 'Songs of Limbo', taken from typescripts in the National Library of Scotland, and a selection of Grassic Gibbon's articles and short fiction, with work done for The Cornhill Magazine along with book reviews and essays on Diffusionism, ancient American civilization and selected studies from his book on the lives of explorers, Nine Against the Unknown.
A Lewis Grassic Gibbon Anthology provides an indispensable supplement to Canongate's edition of A Scots Quair, and it also offers further insight into the wide-ranging interests and the lyrical, historical and political writing of the greatest and best-loved Scottish novelist of the early twentieth century.
About the Author
James Leslie Mitchell, "Lewis Grassic Gibbon" (1901-35), was born and brought up in the rich farming land of Scotland's North-East Coast. After a brief and unsuccessful journalistic career, he joined the Royal Army Service Corps in 1919, serving in Persia, India, and Egypt. Thereafter he spent a further six years as a clerk in the RAF. He married Rebecca Middleton in 1925, and became a full-time writer in 1929. The young couple settled in Welwyn Garden City where they lived until the writer's death in 1935