Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song is regularly voted the greatest Scottish novel of all time. That's enough to catch the interest of many readers. The novel, first published in 1932, is captivating and poetic, both romantic in its familial drama and gritty in its realism. It is set in a fictional farming town in Northeast Scotland, near Aberdeenshire.
Sunset Song, which is the first part of a trilogy known as A Scots Quair, manages to be a hauntingly beautiful depiction of a soon-to-be-gone Scottish way of life while also refusing the easy comfort of simple nostalgia. Grassic Gibbon's prose, heavily flecked with Scots (there's a helpful glossary at the back) and stylized dialect, has a distinct musicality.
Grassic Gibbon, even when he set down to write it, was depicting a rural Scotland that was largely already gone at the time. The book charts the drastic transformation of Scottish farming communities through modernization, the devastating effects of the First World War on the families whose sons and husbands fought.
The dark depiction of family dysfunction and sex shocked some readers when it was first published, but it has gone on to win over generations of admirers. The book has been adapted to TV, the stage and was turned into a film by the celebrated English director Terence Davies in 2015. Paperback, 288 pages.
