‘He took us by the hand to a world most of us had never seen, a world that sets the imagination aloft: a fresh, wild landscape and a carefree proximity to nature that awoke in us the latent nostalgia of childhood and a yearning for a simpler life.’
John Lister-Kaye on Gavin Maxwell
The writer and naturalist Gavin Maxwell is best known for Ring of Bright Water, his moving account of raising otters on the remote west coast of Scotland. In his childhood memoir The House of Elrig he describes, with the same lyrical power that made that earlier book a classic, how it all began. In loving detail he evokes the wild moors around his Scottish home and the creatures that inhabited them. As was then the custom, he was ripped away from this paradise to go to a series of brutalizing schools. But always in his imagination he was at Elrig. It was his refuge and his escape, and the power of his longing and the ecstasy of each return fuel this haunting book. Click here to read an extract from the opening chapter.
And please scroll to find further recommendations for books that set the imagination aloft.
With best wishes, as ever, from the SF office staff
Anna, Hattie & Jess