The Summer Stance - E-book - ePub

With a sensitivity that contrasts with the brutal realities of life, renowned writer and journalist, Lorn Macintyre, intimately portrays the antagonism and hostility aimed at Scottish Travellers as they strive to maintain their dying traditions. The Summer Stance embeds the reader in a way of life few experience and even fewer understand, and one that is fading from the Scottish consciousness. In a remarkable novel Lorn Macintyre binds the reader to characters who alternately draw empathy, horror and bewilderment, whilst powerfully conveying a sense of loss for a misconstrued and disappearing aspect of Scottish culture.
The Summer Stance is more than a story of one man clinging to his traditions, it is a eulogy to centuries of cultural history in danger of being forgotten. About The Summer Stance:Abhainn na Croise, the river of the cross, where the otters swim and the Scottish Travellers camped for generations, working on the land, repairing whatever was broken, and welcomed back each year by the area's settled residents.
Those days are long gone, but Dòmhnall Macdonald, raised in a Glasgow tower block, yearns for the old ways and the freedom they represent. When his grandmother falls ill, Dòmhnall determines to take her back to the Abhainn na Croise one last time - but times have changed too much. Instead of the welcome of old, the returning Travellers are met with suspicion, hostility and violence - and Dòmhnall becomes a hunted man.
Set in the timeless Scottish landscape, Lorn Macintyre's latest novel is an intimate portrait of a misunderstood way of life and a fast disappearing part of Scottish culture.