A Scots Quair

A Scots Quair is revolutionary - innovative in its form, deft and humorous in its use of the Scots language, courageous in its characterisation and politics. Central to the trilogy is Chris Guthrie, one of the most remarkable female characters in modern literature. In Sunset song, Gibbon's finest achievement, the reader follows Chris through her girlhood in a tight-knit Scottish farming community: the seasons, the weddings, the funerals, the grind of work, the gossip. As the Great War takes its toll, machines repalce the old way of life.

Cloud Howe and Grey Granite take Chris from her rural homeland to life in an industrial Scotland and the desperate years of the Depression. The triology as a whole is a major achievment, a picture of society undergoing traumatic and far-reaching transformation. Always readable, never sentimental, A Scots Quair is one of the most important works of Scottish literature.



Lewis Grassic Gibbon was one of the finest writers of the twentieth century. Born in Aberdeenshire in 1901, he died at the age of thirty-four. He was a prolific writer of novels, short stories, essays and science fiction, and his writing reflected his wide interest in religion, archaeology, history, politics and science. The Mearns trilogy, A Scots Quair, is his most renowned work, and has become a landmark in Scottish literature.



'Sunset Song is my favourite book of all time'



'One of the five best Scottish novels of all times'



'I've just re-read Sunset Song, and its great gripping hybrid of melodrama and realism has left me scorched ... Grassic Gibbon's language in the Quair freed me to think language could do anything and everything, could be poetic and realist and dark and soaring and local and strange all at once, with sentences longer than breath; but still all about breathing, or how the heart works'



'The book and their heroine deserve their place in history. There is no better description of the way all these young men from small villages went off to fight in a war, which most of them didn't understand, and from which so many never returned. That is one of the reasons it carries so much resonance… he [Grassic Gibbon] was responsible for creating a masterpiece which will live forever'



'Chris Guthrie is one of the great women of 20th century fiction ... he [Grassic Gibbon] portrays the cataclysmic impact of the war on a generation and their expectations ... Sunset Song is a lament – and a cry of anger, too'



'Sunset Song is regularly voted Scotland's favourite book in public polls, is acclaimed across the world, and remains the most evocative work ever written about the Mearns'



'That flinty Scottish wit – which I experienced first in the books and later recognised when I studied there – flies off the pages in dark sparks'



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