Grey granite Book

Fittingly, I finished Grey Granite, the last book in the Scots Quair, on my final night in Scotland. A couple days prior, my wife and I traveled to northeastern Scotland to visit the Lewis Grassic Gibbon Center and the locations in the immediate area where Sunset Song was set and some of Grey Granite was set. I have a picture of myself and the book in front of the slab of grey granite they displayed outside the Center. The author weaves "grey granite" in to the book often to describe the weather, landscape, an characters' personalities.

Grey Granite was really good but had a different feel that the two prior Scots Quair books. The book is set in the early 1930s and picks up where Cloud Howe left off. The setting is moved to a larger city (fictional Scottish city of Duncairn) and the focus switched away from mostly Chris Guthrie to Chris and her son, Ewan, who was is now in his 20s and has established himself as a spokesperson for worker's rights and becomes and important member of the local communist group.

Like is predecessors, this book is full of fun old-timey Scottish colloquialisms and witty and biting humor. Chris Guthrie continues her run as the strong, no-nonsense heroine of the series. Grey Granite does take a bit of a darker and more violent turn that the others, mostly in the form of police brutality against strikers during workers' rights demonstrations and their incarceration.

The trilogy wraps in a very melancholy and satisfactory manner. Grey Granite was published in 1934, one year before the author died at the young age of 33.