A Twelvemonth and a Day
Christopher Rush
Available as eBook
Introduced by Alan Bold
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 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 politics that damage communities and individuals. It is both a lament for a past time and a celebration of its vanished values.
“With its Bible-size characters, its feeling for workaday rhythms and the cycle of th 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.”
times Literary Supplement
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“… a magical memory of childhood … powerful, vivd, evocative, funny, awesome, loving and so assured in its writing it catches the breath.”
glasgow Herald
Christopher Rush
Christopher Rush was born in 1944 in St Monans, a fishing village in the East Neuk of Fife. He was educated there and at Waid Academy in Anstruther, before going to read English at the University of Aberdeen. There he excelled as a scholar and became an English medal winner. He has since won two Scottish Arts Council Bursaries, two SAC Book Awards and was shortlisted for the McVities’s Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year. Currently he is a teacher of English at George Watson’s College in Edinburgh.
A Twelvemonth and a Day was first published in 1985 and is a semi-autobiographical account of the first twelve years of a boy’s life, about the golden days before experience imposes itself and limits exploration of the world. I was also made into a highly successful film, Venus Peter (1988), of which Rush co-wrote the screenplay.
Rush’s other publications include a poetry collection, A Resurrection of a Kind (1984), and two short story collections, Peace Comes Dropping Slow (1983) and Into the Ebb (1989). His first novel, Last Lesson of the Afternoon, was published in 1994.