Sunset Song

About the book

Published in 1932, Sunset Song is the first novel of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s trilogy A Scots Quair. Chris Guthrie grows up on a farm in Kinraddie, in the Mearns of north-east Scotland, in the years before and during the First World War, torn between the books and schooling that might take her away and her deep attachment to the land. Gibbon, the pen name of James Leslie Mitchell, writes in an English shaped by the rhythms and words of Scots, often in a communal voice that speaks for the whole parish. The novel follows Chris through family hardship, love and the changes the war brings to a farming community, and has often been voted Scotland’s favourite book.

Characters

• Chris Guthrie — Protagonist

  A young woman in rural Scotland, divided between a desire for education and her attachment to the land.

• John Guthrie — Chris's father

  A harsh farmer whose rigid authority shapes the lives of his wife and children.

• Jean Guthrie — Chris's mother

  A woman worn down by repeated pregnancies and the demands of life at Blawearie.

• Will Guthrie — Chris's brother

  Chris's close companion in childhood, increasingly determined to escape their father's control.

• Ewan Tavendale — Farm worker

  A young farm worker whose relationship with Chris grows amid the pressures of rural life and war.

• Chae Strachan — Neighbor

  An outspoken local man whose politics and humor make him a distinctive presence in Kinraddie.

About the author

LG

Lewis Grassic Gibbon

Lewis Grassic Gibbon was the pen name of James Leslie Mitchell (1901–1935), a Scottish writer born in Aberdeenshire and raised on a croft in Arbuthnott, in the Mearns, the farming country of north-east Scotland. He left school to work as a journalist in Aberdeen and Glasgow, and later served as a clerk in the army and the Royal Air Force, spending years in the Middle East. Settled in Welwyn Garden City in England, he wrote with extraordinary speed in the last years of his life, publishing novels, short stories, history and archaeology under his own name. As Lewis Grassic Gibbon he wrote the trilogy A Scots Quair, Sunset Song (1932), Cloud Howe (1933) and Grey Granite (1934), which follows Chris Guthrie from the farm to a small town and then to a city, in a prose shaped by the speech of the Mearns. He died of peritonitis in 1935, at thirty-three.