Edited and introduced by Douglas Gifford. The Three Perils of Man is regarded as Hogg’s most ambitious work of fiction. The book’s extraordinary combination of the fantastic, the funny, the serious and the historically realistic must be unique in literature. The adventures of its characters, told with the author’s characteristically bold simplicity, are many, mad, and breathtakingly fast. Ranging from Galloway to Northumberland, ...
Introduced by Edwin Morgan. A ‘gowk storm’ is an untimely fall of snow in early Spring – a fitting symbol for the anguished story that unfolds. Nearly a hundred years ago, three girls were born to a minister and his wife in a remote Highland manse; the rigid patriarchal structure of the times is set against their approaching womanhood and growing awareness of life beyond the safety of home. After the disposal by marriage of the e ...
This huge novel, closer in scope to a Russian epic than to any English counterpart, opens at the turn of the century in the extreme poverty of the Rhinns of Galloway, an agricultural backwater of the southern-most part of Scotland. With a loving regard for the land and its people, Barke traces the lives of David and Jean Ramsay who, full of hope, painstakingly uproot themselves and their family in the search for prosperity. Their efforts ...
Selected and introduced by Jenni Calder. Ill health drove Robert Louis Stevenson from Scotland; the urge for new and adventurous places drew him to the Pacific. There were those at home who would have been happier to see him purely as a spinner of the picturesque, but Stevenson could not close his eyes to the impact of colonialism, the ‘stir-about of epochs and races, barbarisms and civilizations, virtues and crimes’. This collec ...
Introduced by Christopher Harvie. Set against the religious struggles of seventeenth-century Scotland, with Montrose for the king against a convenanted kirk, John Buchan’s Witch Wood is a gripping atmospheric tale in the spirit of Stevenson and Neil Munro. As a moderate Presbyterian minister, young David Sempill disputes with the extremists of his faith. All around, the defeated remnants of Montrose’s men are being harried and sl ...
Edited and Introduced by Anne McKim. This extraordinary poem has been widely popular and influential ever since it was written in the fifteenth century, and its heroic account of the swordfighter Wallace was to symbolise the cause of liberty and independence to many other countries and cultures in the centuries to come. Looking back to the days of the Bruce and the war of independence, Blind Harry’s poem is not an aristocratic ta ...
Introduced by John Burns. This is the world of universal future war. Faced with the threat of bombs, bacteriological warfare and poison gas, a married couple whose pacifism compels them to opt out of ‘civilisation’, take to the hills to live as fugitives in the wild. Plainly and simply told, Wild Harbour charts the practical difficulties, the successes and failures of living rough in the beautiful hills of remote Speyside. In thi ...
