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Winter Tales

by George Mackay Brown

ISBN: 9781904598879
Imprint: Polygon
Publication Date: Sep 2006
Format: Paperback
Price: £6.99 £4.89
Stock Status: in stock

‘George Mackay Brown finds more diversity of subject and mood in these islands than most writers would see in a city street. He evokes nature constantly, but naturally, with ease and no pretension. His images are stark, carefully placed, and exact . . . A precise, poetic and dazzling writer’ – The Guardian

‘George Mackay Brown’s Winter Tales is an enchanting, tender and robust collection of stories steeped in the ancient rhythms and customs of rural life.’ – Vogue

‘The burnished beauty of his natural descriptions is that of a spellbinding spinner of tales.’ – Scotland on Sunday

‘Light and darkness are common themes in these tales, which all have a fireside ambience. It is easy to imagine Mackay Brown . . . enthralling all before him as the peat crackles and another bottle of malt is encroached.’ – Sunday Express


Winter Tales is a superb collection of tender and compassionate tales, focussing on light and darkness, winter and its festivals, by one of the greatest story-tellers of the 20th century. Through a variety of characters from shipwrecked Scandinavians to an Edinburgh gentleman, George Mackay Brown looks at the impact of new ways of thinking on the traditional way of life of Orkney.


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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