A Calendar of Love (Flamingo modern classic) - Tapa blanda

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The author's first collection of short stories. The characters of these stories - the fishermen, the crofters, the farmers and the wild tinkers - live out their hard and often bitter lives. Other stories recreate the witch trials, the priest hunts and the Viking raiders of earlier days.

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‘Orkney is such a green world in itself,’ writes George Mackay Brown in a foreword to his first collection of short stories. ‘Walk a mile or two and you will see, mixed up with the modern houses of concrete and wood, the “old farmhouses sunk in time”; hall and manse from which laird and minister ruled in the eighteenth century; smuggler’s cave, witch’s hovel ... homesteads of Vikings ... immense burial chambers where the Norse Jerusalem farers broke in and covered the walls with runes.’

Against this background, the characters of these stories – the fishermen, the crofters, the farmers, the wild tinkers and the heavy drinkers – live out their hard and often bitter lives. Other stories, in their mixture of Norse and Scottish legend and history recreate the witch trials, the priest hunts and the Viking raiders of earlier days.

George Mackay Brown writes with a stark brevity which brings the elemental poetry of this whole world vividly before us.

“A precise, poetic and dazzling writer.”
GUARDIAN

“The author’s prose is severely simple and beautiful; he never wastes words, but evokes a complete atmosphere in a phrase ... This is not a book to be gobbled down; it is to be savoured slowly, perhaps one tale each night, so that the enjoyment can be drawn out.”
SCOTTISH FIELD

“No writer alive is more refreshing or entertaining than George Mackay Brown at his vintage best.”
SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY

George Mackay Brown’s novel 'Beside the Ocean of Time' was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize and is available in Flamingo Paperback.