‘It would be impossible to overestimate Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s importance . . . A Scot’s Quair is a landmark work; it permeates the Scottish literary consciousness and colours all subsequent writing of its kind.’ – David Kerr Cameron
In this remarkable first novel, Lewis Grassic Gibbon has sketched the lives of ordinary people living through the Jazz Age and the troubled sexuality of the times.
A transparently autobiographical work, Stained Radiance offers an insight into Gibbon’s development as a writer and political thinker and contains, in Thea Mayven, the most obvious prefiguring of Chris Guthrie, heroine of the Scots Quair trilogy.
Thea, a girl from the Mearns, shares a London flat with the ruthlessly promiscuous Norah Casement and a young milliner, Ellen Ledgworth. The novel follows the relationships of the three young women (and much older, wealthier woman, the dilettantishly political Mrs Gayford) with four men. Thea is involved with a young Air Force clerk and would-be writer, John Garland, possibly Lewis Grassic Gibbon himself.
Lewis Grassic Gibbon (James Leslie Mitchell) was one of the finest writers of the twentieth century. Born in Aberdeenshire in 1901, he died at the age of thirty-four. He was a prolific writer of novels, short stories, essays and science fiction, and his writing reflected his wide interest in religion, archaeology, history, politics and science. The Mearns trilogy, A Scots Quair, is his most renowned work, and has become a landmark in Scottish literature. His novel Sunset Song, one of the Scot’s Quair trilogy, was voted number one in the List/Orange Best Scottish Books of All Time.
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