Book description
Introduced by Tom Crawford. Chris Guthrie and her son, Ewan, have come
to the industrial town of Duncairn, where life is as hard as the granite
of the buildings all around them. These are the Depression years of the
1930s, and Chris is far from the fields of her youth in Sunset Song. In
a society of factory owners, shopkeepers, policemen, petty clerks and
industrial labourers, 'Chris Caledonia' must make her living as bets she
can by working in Ma Cleghorn's boarding house. Ewan finds employment in
a steel foundry and tries to lead a peaceful strike against the
manufacture of armaments. In the face of violence and police brutality,
his socialist idealism is forged into something harder and fiercer as he
becomes a communist activist ready to sacrifice himself, his girlfriend
and even the truth itself, for the cause. Grey Granite is the last and
grimmest volume of the Scots Quair trilogy. Chris Guthrie is one of the
great characters in Scottish Literature and no reader of Sunset Song and
Cloud Howe should miss this last rich chapter in her tale.
