The Grampian Quartet

The Quarry Wood, although published four years before Sunset Song, inhabits the same world as A Scots Quair and its heroine could almost be the alternative story of a Chris Guthrie who did go to university. Compassionate and humorous, the grace and style of her prose are stiffened by a superb ear for the vigorous language of the north east.

Set in the imaginary community of Fetter Rothnie, The Weatherhouse is an even more substantial and complex achievement and belongs to the great line of Scottish fiction dealing with the complex interactions of small communities, and the impact of change on their inhabitants.

Shepherd's third and final novel, A Pass in the Grampians, describes young Jenny Kilgour's coming of age as she has to choose between the kindly harshness of her grandfather's life on a remote hill farm, and the vulgar and glorious energy of Bella Cassie, a local girl who left the community to make a success as a singer, and has now returned to scandalise them all. The Living Mountain is Nan Shepherd's own short testament in praise of the Cairngorms she loved so well. It is a work deeply rooted in her knowledge of the natural world, and a poetic and philosophical meditation on our longing for high and holy places. These titles make up the first omnibus edition of Nan Shepherd's prose works, and they round up a portrait of a novelist whose sensitivity and powers of observation raise her work far above the status of regional literature and into the front rank of Scottish writing. It is perhaps this quiet understatement that has caused the quality of her writing to go unremarked. This omnibus presents the first opportunity for reassessment across the body of her work.