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Beside the Ocean of Time [Paperback]

George Mackay Brown (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
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Product details

  • Paperback: 192 pages
  • Publisher: Polygon An Imprint of Birlinn Limited (1 Mar 2011)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1904598293
  • ISBN-13: 978-1904598299
  • Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12 x 2 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 67,618 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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More About the Author

George Mackay Brown
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Product Description

Product Description

Thorfinn Ragnarson is the daydreaming son of a tenant farmer, avoiding both work and school despite the best efforts of family, friends and neighbours. Instead, the boy dreams up elaborate historical fantasies. In a series of intriguing chapters, George Mackay Brown transforms Thorfinn into a Viking traveller, a freedom-fighter for Bonnie Prince Charlie and the colleague of a Falstaffian knight who participates in the Battle of Bannockburn. He is then hurled into the future as Thor, who returns to the Orkneys as an adult and recalls his internment in a German POW camp, where he discovered his writing skills. Thor also reflects on the history of Orkney, the links between dreaming and writing and the whims of fate. In this beautiful and haunting novel, Brown's lyrical descriptions and gift for local colour capture, as ever, the myth-drenched magic of his native islands.

From the Back Cover

Thorfinn, a crofter's son living on the remote island of Norday, is a dreamy boy ; 'idle and useless' according to his teachers. Bored by school, happier wandering the shores of his island home, he escapes into the limitless world of his imagination. Closing his eyes in the 1930s he dreams of crossing the 'fish-fraught' ocean with Viking raiders. Falling asleep to the monotonous tones of a history lesson he finds himself running from the press gang into the arms of a beautiful seal-maiden who longs to return to the sea. War and adventure, the struggles of great men and the everyday toil of the fisherfolk, Thorfinn dreams the sweep of Norday's history, its life and its inevitable death…

"His finest novel yet: we are reading this author at the height of his powers."
THE TIMES

"The great ocean of time has been more widely sailed and more deeply trawled by George Mackay Brown than by any other writer in Scottish literature. Rich in poetry, emblazoned with marvellous imagery…a millennial reach in which every heron and seal is the embodiment of all its predecessors, every fisherman a descendant of those who harvested the same waters before him."
GLASGOW HERALD

"…mythic stories that affirm the human spirit, clad in a prose of sinuous beauty. George Mackay Brown remains one of our truly inimitable novelists."
DAILY TELEGRAPH

"…richness and colour, wonderful prose and imagery, and through it all you breathe the peat smoke of the croft, the wip of the wind which beats up the spray of the northern seas. A Mackay Brown novel is an event to be savoured, to be read over and over again for its subtleties. It is a joy."
EDINBURGH EVENING NEWS

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
29 of 29 people found the following review helpful
Each page a gem 26 April 2001
Format:Paperback
This was the first George MacKay Brown book I ever read and since then I have managed to read everything in print by this great, under-rated author. He is one of those incredibly rare talents that could paint a picture with a word, descride a life in a page or the history of a people in a chapter. A true storyteller that brought the story of his people(the orcadians) to the world. This book centres on a young boy growing up on an Orkney island and how he see's his world steeped in myth and legend and coloured with characters from the past and present. The author takes the reader into another world of dreams and passions until the end of the book that comes all too quickly. Read this book and experience the lost art of storytelling.
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25 of 25 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I have come to George Mackay Brown very late in life and find it rather fascinating that, once a fortnight, I flew over everything he writes of on my way to and from North Sea oil platforms situated north of the Shetlands. I am now too old and infirm to manage to travel to the Orkney Isles which he describes so well, so must content myself with seeking out his works in Amazon's lists. They are well worth the hunt. Anyone with an interest in such things as the sea, small communities, folk, and life in general should take a peek into his books. They are all great volumes to have at the bedside, especially for those interminable insomniac hours: never waste those hours again if you have his books to hand.
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22 of 23 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A moving tale suffused with magic, poetry and a deep wisdom. From Orkney's greatest Bard, the pages reveal the life of an islander from birth to death, as straighforward and extraordinary as any life.

As with all GMB's work the language is remarkably simple and yet deeply symbolic. Shortlisted for the Booker prize, this work speaks as perfectly and poetically of our green islands as it does of the nature of man and his place in the universe.

This is the work of a truly great poet. Read it!

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