Product Description

SINCE ITS FIRST PUBLICATION in 1984, Night Falls in Ardnamurchan has become a classic account of the life and death of a Highland community. The author weaves his own humorous and perceptive account of crofting with extracts from his father's journal - a terse, factual and down to earth vision of the day-to-day tasks of crofting life. It is an unusual and memorable story that also illuminates the shifting, often tortuous relationships between children and their parents. Alasdair Maclean reveals his own struggle to come to terms with his background and the isolated community he left so often and to which he returned again and again. In this isolated community is seen a microcosm of something central to Scottish identity - the need to escape against the tug of home.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #181416 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Review
'Marvellous; part elegy for a bitterly uneven marriage of man and nature, part excuse for unravelling his own roots' - Observer 'A master of elegant prose, and his book is a refreshing change from the usual diet of rural tales' - Sunday Tribune 'A brutally honest account of the author's family's attempt to come to grips with an unyielding earth' - The Scotsman

About the Author
BORN IN GLASGOW of Highland stock, Alasdair Maclean left school at fourteen to work in the Clydeside shipyards. National Service in the Merchant Marine followed and then service in the British and Indian Armies. He returned to Scotland to read English at Edinburgh University before returning home to Sanna in Ardnamurchan. A poet of some repute, this is his only book of non fiction.

Customer Reviews

What the Rough Guide doesn't tell you...
I returned to this book after visiting Ardnamurchan not just because I wanted a reminder of that starkly beautiful place but because I was haunted by Alistair Maclean's portrait of his father, which dominates the first half of the book. His upbringing could not be more different from my own, but the perceptive observations on the relationships between children and their parents struck a very resounding chord. The evocation of landscape is equally accurate, as anyone who has been to the wind-whipped hamlet of Sanna will appreciate. The second part which deals with Maclean's return to Ardnamurchan and his struggle to live and work there, is a little hard going, but worth persevering with. His sense of humour is also an unexpected bonus in what could be a relentless read.

A minor quibble about the cover photograph - very pretty and Colin Baxter but nothing like as appropriate as the original edition which was all shrunken crofts and overbearing cliffs. But a big hurrah to the publishers for unearthing what was the Lord Lucan of Scottish travel writing - the book I'd heard much about but had to wait years to actually read and have my own copy of.