Sunset Song

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the cities of Scotland, particularly Glasgow, were home to the most extreme poverty in all of Europe. Beyond the urban squalor, however, rural Scotland was suffering as well; the effects of modernization, industrialization, and, eventually, the human and environmental cost of war were destroying the traditional way of life. Lewis Grassic Gibbon attempted to capture this in his trilogy A Scots Quair. Sunset Song, the first novel in the series, is a depiction of the slow decline of the Scottish agricultural communities, with the small town of Kinraddie serving as a symbol of the greater transition felt throughout the country. The later novels, Cloud Howe and Grey Granite, tackle the issues of the decline of faith in the church and the effects of the Great Depression in Scotland, respectively.