His three great novels have the impetus and music of mountain burns in full spate.
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'
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'
The Guardian - Jim Naughtie
One of the five best Scottish novels of all times'
The Wall Street Journal - Ian Rankin
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'
Sunset Song is my favourite book of all time'
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'
It is gritty and passionate and one of Scotland's great 20th-century novels
An evocative look at female life on the Scottish frontier . . . Sunset Song is the story of a resilient young woman during the early 20th 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
His three great novels have the impetus and music of mountain burns in full spate
If this new edition is prompting you to re-read Sunset Song after many years, as I have just done, 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
Chris Guthrie is the most passionate and appealing heroine in Scottish literature; Grassic Gibbon's magnificent novel is fresh, powerful and timeless
An unforgettable evocation of a way of life that has slipped away . . . It is a love song for a landscape and language still familiar - and precious - to a generation born long after [Grassic Gibbon] died . . . Chris is one of the great women of 20th-century fiction
Sunset Song 's great gripping hybrid of melodrama and realism . . . left me scorched
A British literary classic
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
"For more than seventy years Sunset Song ’s readers have passionately loved this unflinching yearn of a book and its evocation of adolescence and coming of age. Its loamy sensuality and its heightened language evoke a rare kind of reader intoxication." —Ali Smith
An evocative look at female life on the Scottish frontier . . . Sunset Song is the story of a resilient young woman during the early 20th 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
It is gritty and passionate and one of Scotland's great 20th-century novels
