Sunset Song

'Oh, she hated and loved in a breath!'

Faced with the choice between her harsh farming life and the seductive world of books and learning, the spirited Chris Guthrie decides to remain in rural Scotland. But as the devastation of the First World War leaves Chris and her community in tatters, she must draw strength from what she loves – and endure, like the land she loves so intensely.

Powerful and moving, Sunset Song is an inspirational celebration of the human spirit.



Lewis Grassic Gibbon (James Leslie Mitchell) 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.

Ian Campbell is emeritus Professor of Scottish and Victorian Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He has worked with the Lewis Grassic Gibbon estate (now in the National Library of Scotland) and the Grassic Gibbon Centre in Arbuthnott.

Kapka Kassabova is a prize-winning writer of non-fiction and poetry. She lives by a river in the Scottish Highlands.



'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'



'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'



'His three great novels have the impetus and music of mountain burns in full spate'



'It is gritty and passionate and one of Scotland's great twentieth-century novels'



'One of the greatest Scottish novels of the twentieth century'



'A masterpiece of modernist prose and a landmark in Scottish writing'



'It captures both the endurance of the land and the fragility of human lives upon it'



'A classic novel of love, hardship and survival, written with a poetic intensity that has lost none of its power'



'Chris Guthrie is the most passionate and appealing heroine in Scottish literature; Grassic Gibbon's magnificent novel is fresh, powerful and timeless'



'One of literature's most enduring heroines — as strong as the land she's bound to'



'Sunset Song's great gripping hybrid of melodrama and realism . . . left me scorched'



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'



'Portrayed with a lyrical intensity that echoes through the years and still resonates today'



'An evocative look at female life on the Scottish frontier . . . Sunset Song is the story of a resilient young woman during the early twentieth 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'