Introduced by J. B. Pick.When a ship is wrecked on a rocky Highland coast in a wild night of a storm, Charlie MacIan drags a drowning seaman out of the pounding waves. The seaman is clinging to a wooden chest. Brought into a shelter, he is found to be dead—but was his death accidental? And did the chest once contain money?These questions hang like a threat over the various members of a small community struggling to keep life going on a hard, relentless coast. It is a mystery in which Neil Gunn displays his skills as a writer of depth and subtlety and we emerge from the tale asking questions about the nature and meaning of community itself, and how it can survive in this bewildering and violent century.

From this evocative title comes a powerful novel set in the city of Glasgow in 1939. The main character, a journalist, finds that a glimpse of wild geese catalyses the development of his thinking on various levels – social, political and psychological. The contrast of urban and rural life, characteristically penetrating dialogue, remarkable insight, physical violence...all are included and take the reader on an absorbing and enlightening journey to the story's dénouement.

At the heart of The Silver Bough is a cairn on a knoll surrounded by standing stones. This is of professional interest to an archaeologist, around whom the story revolves. The plot of the book is imaginative and intricate, and includes the mystery of skeletons found in a cist in the cairn. As the dig proceeds, gold is discovered and then disappears. Has it been taken by the lad the archaeologist has been employing? The search is on and the standing stone claims its sacrificial victim.

The Lost Glen vividly portrays a clash of cultures and personalities against a background of a landscape in visible decay. The cultural collision and its effects are explored through Ewan, recently returned from university in disgrace, and a retired English colonel staying at the village hotel. The Colonel is an aggressive bully, although his young niece behaves with sensitivity and integrity. The antipathy between the two main protagonists leads to a physical struggle that is more a symbolic drama than a novel of realism.

The Silver Darlings is a tale of lives hard won from a cruel sea and crueller landlords. It tells of strong young men and stronger women whose loves, fears and sorrows are set deep in a landscape of raw beauty and bleak reward. The dawning of the Herring Fisheries brought with it the hope of escape from the brutality of the Highland Clearances, and Neil Gunn's story paints a vivid picture of a community fighting against nature and history and refusing to be crushed.

A novel set in a Highland shooting lodge, where the focus is a hunt in a remote deer forest; but this is no ordinary thriller. Featured is the lodge party of wealthy English people, a team of Highland stalkers, a legendary stag to be hunted and a background of glen and corrie, shrouded from time to time by impenetrable mist. Culture and personality clashes and mystery, which portent much deeper clashes between spiritual and material values, provide a vastly enjoyable read.

Horrific experiences of the blitz in wartime London and the spiritual bankruptcy of her lover and his Marxist acquaintances are seen through the eyes of Nan, a young Scotswoman, who has returned to her native Highlands to recover from a nervous breakdown. Written with all the power of a master hand this is a subtly thoughtful and gripping novel that has a strange relevance to today's events.

Edited and introduced by Francis Russell Hart.Opening with a premonition of death, The Serpent infuses many of Gunn's favourite themes with a sense of drama and urgency. This is a story of a young man's conflict with the spiritual authority of his father, a spirit of scepticism set against an authoritarian Calvinism. The serpent of the book is the serpent of wisdom, representing his reconciliation of both of these opposite and a recognition of the inarticulate understanding of his mother, an understanding which enables him to reconcile himself with living in the Highlands. His breakdown after his father's death and his restoration through his growing empathy with his mother are amongst the most moving scenes in Scottish literature. As a counterpoise Tom's secret love affair with Janet is one of the most intense and subtle in Gunn's fiction.This conflict succeeds in bringing alive both the psychological and economic position of the Highlands in the early years of...