‘One of the masters of the short story form’ – Ali Smith
‘The simple beauty of Mackay Brown’s language, which is sensitive, meditated and achieved, is not an adornment: for all the pleasure it affords of itself it is also an exact measure of the writer’s sense of the beauty of the scene . . . Mackay Brown ranges easily over the centuries.’ – Sunday Times
‘George Mackay Brown is a poet, whose stories in A Calendar of Love are all set on Orkney. They moved about easily in time taking in Vikings, witches, heretics, sailors and drunks. They are strange and fierce and quietly truthful.’ – Daily Telegraph
‘George Mackay Brown writes terse muscular poetry with echoes of the sagas. There are the same virtues in A Calendar of Love, stories in an Orkney setting that range from love and booze on national Assistance to excursions into island history, bloody or serene.’ – The Guardian
‘The author’s prose is severely simple and beautiful; he never wastes words, but evokes a complete atmosphere in a phrase.’ – Scottish Field
'Timeless and meditative prose of extraordinary beauty.' - Inverness Courier
In this, George Mackay Brown’s first collection of short stories, the themes he would develop over his career are set out – an obsession with his home Orkney, its dark and violent Viking past, the cycle of the seasons, and the struggle of its inhabitants. The characters of these stories – the fishermen, the crofters, the farmers and the wild tinkers – are all struggling to live their lives and find their identities in a harsh habitat and a cruel age. The stories in this collection share the same melancholy tone and sense of the ceaseless renewal made possible by the natural cycle.
George Mackay Brown is one the major Scottish literary figures of the 20th century. A prolific poet and novelist, he took much of his inspiration from the myths and landscape of Orkney, and also from his deep Catholic faith. His collection of short stories A Time to Keep (1971) won the Katherine Mansfield Mentor short story prize, while Beside the Ocean of Time was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker prize; he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1977. He died in 1996.
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