An Orkney Tapestry [Paperback]

George Mackay brown (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Quartet Books (1972)
• ASIN: B000LPM7LY
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars wonderfully atmospheric, October 21, 2008

By 

grothersbooks (New Mexico) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Orkney Tapestry (Hardcover)

This is a wonderfully atmospheric book, and a most unusual one, mingling stories, legends, evocative places, poems, description, customs and beautiful pictures into a marvellous whole which represents the Orkney Islands better than any other book I know. The writer was George Mackay Brown and the excellent illustrator Sylvia Wishart, whose black and white drawings add a great deal to the book's appeal. It was the book which drew the composer Peter Maxwell Davies to the Islands - eventually he bought a house there, at Rackwick Bay on Hoy, leading to well over twenty years of productive islands-based work and the foundation of the St. Magnus Festival. It somehow catches the presence and the spirit of the Islands, so that you are there even as you read it on Mainland Scotland, or mainland anywhere for that matter. It bears rereading well, and every time there is something new in it. Actually, it's quite a difficult book to describe, and it occurs to me that the title word, 'Tapestry', is just about perfect - a beautiful and complex whole woven out of many harmonious strands. It is a wonderful book.

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Written by: Mr. Ian A. Macfarlane "almac1975" on 20 April 2007