Now Posting on Vulpes Libris: Nan Shepherd’s The Quarry Wood

I posted a review of Nan Shepherd’s 1928 novel The Quarry Wood over at Vulpes Libris today. Liked the novel very much, the first in a trilogy of north-east Scottish farming novels that I should have read decades ago, reprinted by Canongate as a collected works called The Grampian Quartet (there’s a non-fiction memoir of hill-walking in there too).

I’m fascinated reading about my home town, Aberdeen, through the eyes of a superb novelist. I’m also fascinated by how the cruelty and malice of Aberdeenshire country folk seems to be the dominant feature of Shepherd’s writing, as well as in Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s novels of A Scots Quair. Not something I recall from my childhood at all.