In a few words
Chosen by The List magazine as one of the 100 Best Scottish Books of All Time.
With its Bible-size characters, its feeling for workaday rhythms and the cycle of seasons, its tall and grisly tales of storms and wrecks, whales and sharks, witches and fetches, drownings and exhumations, it does convey a sense of that fatalistic awe which the sea inspired in those deeply devout fishing communities.
. . . a magical memory of childhood . . . powerful, vivid, evocative, funny, awesome, loving and so assured in its writing it catches the breath.
More about
the book
In childhood there is no distinction between, boy, bird, mammal or fish. A Twelvemonth and a Day is about change and growth, the fluctuating patterns in the worklife of a fishing and farming community throughout the whole cycle of a year, and about the year itself, the life of nature. It tells of how that symbolic year-and-a-day can be destroyed by forces we cannot seem to control – ignorance and greed, profit and loss, the wider forces of ploitics that damage communities and individuals. It is both a lament for a past time and acelebration of its vanished values.
