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The Drinking Well

ISBN: 9781904598893
Author: Neil M. Gunn
Imprint: Polygon
Publication Date: Oct 2006
Format: PB
Price: £7.99
Stock Status: in stock

‘A brilliant novelist’ – Lewis Grassic Gibbon

‘Modern Scottish fiction reaches its highest peak in the novels of Neil M. Gunn . . . he transcends regionalism and acquires universality.’ – The Scotsman


Iain Cattanach lives happily in a small tight-knit Highland village, but his self-sacrificing mother has other plans for him. A position with an Edinburgh legal firm is secured and he leaves to seek a new life in the city. Eventually, circumstances lead Iain back to his home village, to an emotional return to the source of life – the drinking well.

Influenced directly by experiences in his own life, Gunn writes with exhilaration and wisdom about the reality of living in a rural community, the allure of city life, the development of political and artistic awareness, and the triumph of the human spirit.


Neil Miller Gunn is recognised as one of the most important writers to emerge in 20th century British literature, and a leading light in the Scottish Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. He held a lifelong commitment to the ideals of Scottish nationalism and socialism, and as a prolific critic, dramatist and author of over twenty novels he and Lewis Grassic Gibbon were arguably the most influential Scottish writers of the early 20th century.

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