Sunset Song (Penguin Classics)

by Ali Smith (Introduction), Lewis Grassic Gibbon (Author), Lewis Grassic Gibbon (Author), Ali Smith (Introduction)

• Used

  Paperback
  2007

  $5.14

  WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ALI SMITH Young Chris Guthrie lives a brutal life in the harsh landscape of northern Scotland, torn between her passion for the land, duty to her family and her love of books. When her mother, broken by repeated childbirths, takes her own life and poisons her two youngest children, Chris is left with her father to run the farm on her own. Soon she is alone, and for the first time can choose how to spend her life. But as the First World War begins, everything changes, and the young men leave Scotland for battle. The first in Gibbon's classic trilogy A Scot's Quair, Sunset Song is infused with local vernacular, and innovatively blends Scots and English in an intense description of Scottish life in the early twentieth century.

• Used

  Paperback
  1971

  $3.28

• New

  Paperback
  2006

  $11.04

  Faced with a choice between her harsh farming life and the seductive but distant world of books and learning, Chris Guthrie eventually decides to remain in her rural community, bound by her intense love of the land. However, the intervention of the First World War leaves her choice in tatters. Chris is now a widowed single mother: her farm, and the land it occupies, is altered beyond recognition - trees torn down, people displaced. But although the novel describes a way of life which is in decline, it also presents a strong image of hope. Chris adapts to her new world, displaying an intuitive strength which, like the land which she loves, endures despite everything. Sunset Song is a testament to Scotland's agricultural past, to the world of crofters and tradition which was destroyed in the First World War. It is a powerful description of life in the first few decades of the century through the evocation of change and the lyrical intensity of its prose. Renowned expert Ian Campbell has produced the first new scholarly text for fifteen years and has the blessing of the Lewis Grassic Gibbon estate.