Gunn captures the spirit of Highland culture, the sense of community and tradition, in a manner that speaks to our own time.At the centre of the novel is Dark Mairi who embodies what is most vital and lasting in mankind, whose values encapsulate what was lost in Scotland to make way for progress while her land was cleared to make way for wintering sheep.The weaving of traditional ballads with the lives of Gunn's characters evokes the community that must be destroyed. Elie lost among strangers with her fatherless child while Seonaid defies the invaders, fighting them from the roof of her croft. This is among the most moving of Gunn's works and establishes the belief in a transcendent spirituality that would be so dominant in his later work.

    

    Contents: The Devil and His Folk in Scottish Life and Literature; Tam O'Shanter by Robert Burns; Wandering Willie's Tale by Sir Walter Scott; Thrawn Janet and The Tale of Tod Lapraik both by Robert Louis Stevenson.

    Shortly afterwards, came this collection of poetry, In the Cairngorms, which was published in a small edition by the Moray Press of Edinburgh in 1934. Then came The Living Mountain, (recently re-published by Canongate Books), a work of poetic prose exploring Shepherd’s close relationship with the hills, which was written in the 1940s, but not published until 1977. It has recently become a great success, helped partly by its place in Robert Macfarlane’s bestseller, The Old Ways, but also because her work – with its passion for mountains, for landscape beauty, and for 'living all the way through', as she put it – is resonating with the many people drawn to wild places in their imaginations or in actuality.In The Cairngorms was the book of which Shepherd was the most proud. According to Robert Macfarlane: “Shepherd had a clear genre hierarchy in her mind, and poetry was at its pinnacle. 'Poetry' she wrote to the novelist Neil Gunn … holds 'in intensest being the very heart of all experience', and offers glimpses of 'that burning heart of life.'” Indeed, the poems that form the first and main section of the book show a fierce and often eerie lyricism at work, part-Romantic and part-modern. All are born from Shepherd’s life-long acquaintance with the Cairngorm mountains.The final section consists of a sequence of love sonnets, written, according to Shepherd, for a man whose identity is never disclosed (Shepherd never married). This is a volume that speaks eloquently both to lovers of poetry and lovers of nature. It will be enjoyed by a modern audience not only for the beauty of its mountain context but also for the sheer strength of the verse.