Cloud Howe

Lewis Grassic Gibbon

Jul 2010 · Canongate Books

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Introduced by Tom Crawford. The compelling saga of Chris Guthrie is continued in this, the middle volume of Grassic Gibbon’s great trilogy A Scots Quair. The scene has moved to the small community of Segget, where, after Ewan’s death in the First World War, Chris has come to live with her second husband, Robert Colquhoun, an idealistic and liberal minister. Cloud Howe offers a brilliant evocation of small town life set against post-war economic hardship and the General Strike of 1926. Chris loses her baby and has to fight for a sense of her own identity in a world where only the land—and Chris herself—seem to endure with honour. Robert Colquhoun, wracked by war-ruined lungs, has to wrestle with his ideals and a spiritual crisis which will eventually kill him. Grassic Gibbon was already living in England when he wrote his great work. The incomparable artistry of Cloud Howe makes his self-imposed exile all the more poignant.

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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.