Sunset Song

I received this as a prize at school when I was fifteen and passages like this spoke to me: “...you wanted the words they'd known and used, forgotten in the far‑off youngness of their lives, Scots words to tell to your heart, how they wrung it and held it.” My Ayrshire community spoke Scots so it was life changing to read this message by an author from a different time and a different place who was  intensely relevant to my own situation. Being discouraged or even punished for speaking Scots in school, led us to learn English pretty quickly and… show more.

Written in 1932, but set at the turn of the twentieth century, this beautifully written and evocative novel has been adapted to both stage and film. I love this book with a passion, because of the beautiful prose and because in a way it taught me how the ordinary lives of my people are inextricably intertwined with the land. Sunset Song follows the life of Chris Guthrie a young woman on the east coast of Scotland, her relationship to the land and to the poor farming community she has grown up in. Like my novel, it is the first installment… show more.

Sunset Song is, like Flemington, set in the northeast of Scotland, this time in a farming community before, during, and after the First World War. It unsentimentally chronicles the hard life of an independent-minded, sympathetic woman, at a time when mechanisation was crowding out the old rural ways, and the Great War had taken away the men and changed the survivors almost out of recognition. It is a tale of many tragedies and limited redemption, written with a powerful depth of feeling and sense of place.