It is also, without a shadow of doubt, my favourite book of all time. Sunset Song is all of this, and much more. It is a story of both transience and continuity. And they remind us that the joys and heartbreaks of our own lives are but the blink of an eye in the grand sweep of history.

The ancient Standing Stones, at which the book’s main character, Chris Guthrie, seeks refuge at times of grief or personal turmoil, help to place the story and its setting in a historical context. It was the old Scotland that perished then, and we may believe that never again will the old speech and the old songs, the old curses and the old benedictions, rise but with alien effort to our lips.īut the novel is also, and without a hint of sentimentality or ‘kailyardism’, a story of human resilience and spirit.The characters draw strength and perspective from the land, even as it takes its toll on them. A central theme of the book is the passing of the ‘old Scotland’, a theme powerfully articulated towards the end as the minister unveils a memorial to the parish’s war dead: Kinraddie, the book’s fictional setting, also represents a world in transition.The rural practices and way of life that the story’s characters have always known are increasingly challenged by advancing technology and the impact of war.

Crushing poverty, the hard toil of earning a living from the land, the sternness of religion and the oppressive reality of life for women in particular – these are the themes that provide the context and background to the lives whose stories unfold in the book. Set in the North East of Scotland around the outbreak of the First World War, the novel pulls no punches in its harsh realism.

Sunset Song tells a beautiful, though often heartbreaking, story. Read on to discover why she considers it “without a shadow of a doubt, my favourite novel of all time”.

We’re delighted to share that introduction here. In 2016 it topped a BBC poll to be named Scotland’s Favourite Novel – and last week we published a beautiful hardback edition with a new introduction by Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon. At almost ninety years old, Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon has shown itself to be an enduring classic, nothing less than one of the greatest books of the 20th Century.

The sunset song book