Book description
The life of a fisherman is a hard one. ‘Mondays to Fridays he takes his
boat to sea, Saturdays he takes his thirst to a pub, and Sundays he
takes his wife to bed. And by God, by the time Monday morning’s come
around his wife is that sick of him that she’s as pleased as the
seagulls to get him off to see again.’ David Jones did not take long to
see the reason why.
A climbing holiday brought David Jones to the West Coast of Scotland.
Chance, or was it fate, introduced him to Donald. The days, which grew
into weeks, that he spent fishing for lobster and herring were unlike
any that he had ever known before, and as he progresses from being a
‘Green Hand’ to a practised fisherman, he finds the change from his
strict chapel-going home in Wales to this new world of the ‘Hairy
Wullies’, the scalders and the dominating figure of King Herring both
stimulating and hilarious.
‘Fans will rush to snap up her latest novel’ Sunday Post
Lilian Comber wrote fiction and non-fiction for both adults and
children under the pseudonym Lillian Beckwith. She is best known for her
series of comic novels based on her time living on a croft in the
Scottish Hebrides.
Beckwith was born in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, in 1916, where her
father ran a grocery shop. The shop provided the background for her
memoir About My Father's Business
, a child’s eye view of a 1920s family. She moved to the Isle of Skye
with her husband in 1942, and began writing fiction after moving to the
Isle of Man with her family twenty years later. She also completed a
cookery book, Secrets from a Crofter’s Kitchen
(Arrow, 1976).
Since her death, Beckwith’s novel A Shine of Rainbows
has been made into a film starring Aidan Quinn and Connie Nielsen,
which in 2009 won ‘Best Feature’ awards at the Heartland and Chicago
Children’s Film Festivals.
