Winter Tales [Paperback]

'George Mackay Brown's 'Winter Tales' is an enchanting, tender and robust collection of stories steeped in the ancient rhythms and customs of rural life.' --Vogue

'The burnished beauty of his natural descriptions is that of a spellbinding spinner of tales, making his a worthy addition to the trove he would preserve.' --Scotland on Sunday

'In this collection the author is at his celebratory and affirmative best. Everything he writes about is rooted in the harsh Orkney landscape, yet is often heart-achingly tender and compassionate.' --Yorkshire Post

This is a superb collection of stories, focusing on light and darkness, winter and its festivals, by one of the greatest story-tellers of the twentieth century. Through a variety of characters from shipwrecked Scandinavians to an Edinburgh gentleman, George Mackay Brown looks at the impact of new ways of thinking on the traditional way of life of Orkney.

Winter and its festivals, celebrated alike by Orkney's Stone-Age builders and their Christian successors as a time of light springing from darkness, predominate in this superb collection from one of the great storytellers of our time.

Here Lieutenant William Bligh comes to the little port of Hamnavoe, an Edinburgh gentlemen rediscovers his roots in Shetland, Scandinavians are shipwrecked on the Orkney coast, and we follow Norse warriors to the Holy Land. Most characteristically, George Mackay Brown looks at the effect of new ways of thinking and working on the ancient patterns of Orkney life.

Light and darkness are common themes in these tales, which all have a fireside ambience.. It is easy to imagine Mackay Brown…Enthralling all before him as the peat crackles and another bottle of malt is broached"
SUNDAY EXPRESS

"George Mackay Brown's 'Winter Tales' is an enchanting, tender and robust collection of stories steeped in the ancient rhythms and customs of rural life…"
VOGUE

"In this collection the author is at his celebratory and affirmative best. Everything he writes about is rooted in the harsh Orkney landscape, yet is often heart-achingly tender and compassionate"
YORKSHIRE POST

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

George Mackay Brown was born in Stromness, Orkney (the 'Hamnavoe' of his stories and poems), in 1921. He was at Newbattle Abbey College while Edwin Muir was Warden. He read English at Edinburgh University and afterwards did postgraduate work on Gerard Manley Hopkins. He became a Catholic in 1961. He died in Orkney in 1996.