George Mackay Brown Books

The poems of one of Scotland's finest poets collected in a single volume.

A full and accessibly-written survey of Bede and his works, including a chapter on his legacy for subsequent history.

Light wear to the covers. Shipped from the UK in recyclable card packaging.

This collection of stories demonstrates the full range of George Mackay Brown's literary talent. All of these sharply-etched fables deal with his perennial themes - love, violence, death and rebirth - and are set in an Orcadian world that spans myth and reality, past and present.

Set against the harsh background of Orkney, this collection of stories tells of fishermen, crofters, farmers and tinkers and how they live out their lives. The author succeeds in writing in a style that takes the reader into the realm of the mystical.

'The First Wash of Spring' collects some of George Mackay Brown's lyrical and independent-minded musings of those subjects that took his interest.

Lists towns, villages, islands, mountains, lochs and rivers of Scotland. This book explains how, over successive generations with political, economic and cultural changes, while Scots became established, place names were not renewed or translated - they were merely Scotticised.

These two long stories are set, like most of George Mackay Brown's work, in Orkney and in a period, the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the pattern of island life, little changed since Viking times, was beginning to be threatened.

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 of himself as 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.

First published in 1969, An Orkney Tapestry, George Mackay Brown's seminal work, is a unique look at Orkney through the eye of a poet and a celebration of Orkney's people, language and history. Unavailable for many years, this new edition has a specially commissioned Introduction written by Kirsteen McCue and Linden Bicket.