Witch Wood

by John Buchan

Overview

"Witch Wood" is a 1927 novel by the Scottish author John Buchan that critics have called his masterpiece. The book is set in the Scottish Borders during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, and combines the author's interests in landscape, 17th century Calvinism, and the fate of Scotland.

The novel details mysterious events in seventeenth-century rural Scotland. At the time the novel appeared, Samuel Merwin of the Saturday Review, 13 August 1927, commented that "His [Buchan's] knowledge and his sense of the past seem to me to find their best outlet in this new book... He has taken an old border legend, of a gentle country minister, supposed to have been spirited away by the fairies in the dark wood of Melanudrigill, and has breathed an astonishing life into it."

Product Details

BN ID:	2940186432562
Publisher:	Anthony Bly
Publication date:	01/04/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir GCMG GCVO CH PC DL (26 August 1875 – 11 February 1940) was a British novelist, historian, and Unionist politician who served as Governor General of Canada, the 15th since Canadian Confederation.

After a brief legal career, Buchan simultaneously began his writing career and his political and diplomatic careers, serving as a private secretary to the administrator of various colonies in southern Africa. He eventually wrote propaganda for the British war effort during the First World War. He was elected Member of Parliament for the Combined Scottish Universities in 1927, but he spent most of his time on his writing career, notably writing "The Thirty-Nine Steps" and other adventure fiction.