Divided between her love of the land and the harshness of farming life, young Chris Guthrie finally decides to stay in the rural community of her childhood. Yet World War I and the changes that follow seem to mock the emotions and experiences of her youth.

Lewis Grassic Gibbon was the pseudonym of James Leslie Mitchell (1901-1935), a Scottish writer. Mitchell started working as a journalist for the Aberdeen Journal and the Scottish Farmer at age 16. In 1919 he joined the Royal Army Service Corps and served in Persia, India and Egypt before enlisting in the Royal Air Force in 1920. He began writing full-time in 1929. Mitchell attracted attention from his earliest attempts at fiction, notably from H. G. Wells, but it was his trilogy entitled ' Scots Quair, and in particular its first book Sunset Song (1932), with which he made his mark. A Scots Quair with its combination of realist narrative and lyrical use of dialect is considered to be among the defining works of 20th century Scottish Renaissance. The two other books in the trilogy are Cloud Howe (1933) and Grey Granite (1934). Amongst his other works are Stained Radiance (1930), The Lost Trumpet (1932) and The Conquest of the Maya (1934).

Chris Guthrie and her son, Ewan, have come to the industrial town of Duncairn, where life is as hard as the granite of the buildings all around them. These are the Depression years of the 1930s, and Chris is far from the fields of her youth in Sunset Song . In a society of factory owners, shopkeepers, policemen, petty clerks and industrial labourers, 'Chris Caledonia' must make her living as bets she can by working in Ma Cleghorn's boarding house. Ewan finds employment in a steel foundry and tries to lead a peaceful strike against the manufacture of armaments. In the face of violence and police brutality, his socialist idealism is forged into something harder and fiercer as he becomes a communist activist ready to sacrifice himself, his girlfriend and even the truth itself, for the cause. Grey Granite is the last and grimmest volume of the Scots Quair trilogy. Chris Guthrie is one of the great characters in Scottish Literature and no reader of Sunset Song and Cloud Howe should miss this last rich chapter in her tale.

A Scots Quair is revolutionary - innovative in its form, deft and humorous in its use of language, courageous in its characterization and politics. Central to the trilogy is Chris Guthrie, one of the most remarkable female characters in modern literature. In Sunset Song, Gibbon's finest achievement, the reader follows Chris through her girlhood in a tight-knit Scottish farming community: the seasons, the weddings, the funerals, the grind of work, the gossip. As the Great War takes its toll, machines replace the old way of life. Cloud Howe and Grey Granite take Chris from her rural homeland to life in an industrial Scotland and the desperate years of the Depression. The trilogy as a whole is a major achievement, a picture of a society undergoing traumatic and far-reaching transformation. Always readable, never sentimental, A Scots Quair is one of the most important works of modern Scottish literature.