Sunset Song's great gripping hybrid of melodrama and realism . . . left me scorched -- ALI SMITH
Chris Guthrie is the most passionate and appealing heroine in Scottish literature; Grassic Gibbon's magnificent novel is fresh, powerful and timeless -- ANNE DONOVAN
This book may be read with delight the world over * * New York Times * *
Beautifully written . . . While describing a way of life in decline, it also presents a vision of hope for the future via its strong female lead character * * Independent on Sunday * *
It is gritty and passionate and one of Scotland's great 20th-century novels -- Jim Naughtie * * Daily Express * *
Cries out for the widest international audience * * Herald * *
His three great novels have the impetus and music of mountain burns in full spate * * Observer * *
When I read Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song in my mid-teens I entered into it with such wholehearted love that I longed to live inside it . . . Chris is the centre of the novel and its genius, vivid on every page where she's present. You feel how she must have possessed the writer, as powerfully as if he knew her . . . . Reading her again now, she convinces me absolutely as a real female -- TESSA HADLEY * * Guardian * *

James Leslie Mitchell, 'Lewis Grassic Gibbon' (1901-35), was born and brought up in the rich farming land of Scotland's North-East coast. After a brief journalistic career, he joined the Royal Army Service Corps in 1919, serving in Persia, India and Egypt before he spent six years as a clerk in the RAF. He married Rebecca Middleton in 1925, and became a full-time writer in 1929. He was a prolific writer of novels, short stories and essays and had seventeen full length books published before his untimely death at the age of thirty-four. He adopted his maternal grandmother's name for his Scottish work including A Scots Quair: Sunset Song, Cloud Howe and Grey Granite. An unfinished novel, The Speak of the Mearns, was published posthumously in 1982.