Nan Shepherd

The finest book ever written on nature and landscape in Britain: said a newspaper of this when it was first published. The manuscript was completed in 1944, Nan Shepherd showed it to a friend, who thought it would be tough to find a publisher. Shepherd recevied one rejection and then left the MS in a drawer. In 1977, Aberdeen University Press printed a small edition. Later, Robert Macfarlane was introduced to it and wrote: "I read it, and was changed" in his first-rate introduction. You will be, too.

The Weatherhouse takes place in a small fictitious town in Scotland named Fetter-Rothnie. Many of the men have left in pursuit of war, and the women who remain have become accustomed to living in a female-dominated community. As in The Living Mountain, the sense of place is built vividly from the outset, and Shepherd's imagery is beautiful. She writes, for instance: 'On the willows by the pool the catkins were fluffed, insubstantial, their stamens held so lightly to the tree that they seemed like the golden essence of its life escaping to the liberty of air.'

The novel is on a small scale, focused on a farming community & centring on Martha who we meet at the age of nine, and whose initial appearance in the first sentence is to give her great aunt something of kicking. By the end of the novel we leave a mature young woman in her twenties, ready to take up what possibilities life has to offer her, although what direction she will take is left something of an open question.