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ABOUT THIS BOOK

PUBLISHER: NORTH HOUSE PRESS

ISBN: 9781918204001

RRP: £15.00

PAGES: 288

PUBLICATION DATE:
May 21, 2026

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The Grey Coast

by Neil Gunn, introduction by Alan Riach

A compelling, dramatic and deeply psychological story of youthful love and trapped hopes set in the startling landscape of the far North. First published by Jonathan Cape in 1926, this centenary edition celebrates a major talent and the work of one of Scotland’s most important and neglected writers.

The wide-open skies, fierce seas and the ever-changing weather of Scotland’s farthest reaches, provides the setting for this gripping and emotionally acute study of young love and youthful ambition and the constraints and violence of a traditional community. Maggie and Ivor struggle to connect in a world that seems fixed on keeping them apart.

The Grey Coast is a magnificent novel of land and the people who live upon it.

Timeless, uncompromising and exhilarating, this is a work that marks the arrival of a startling new talent. It introduces a host of compelling characters and way of life that – though vastly different to our present age – demand our attention as much now as ever.

Gunn is a major Scottish writer with an international reputation; this beautiful new edition aims to re-establish him as a central figure in Scottish letters.

Reviews of The Grey Coast

'His ability scrupulously to evoke the landscapes and the peoples of the highlands, his blending together of myth and reality and his wide-ranging imagination make Neil Gunn the most important Scottish novelist of the 20th Century.' – Trevor Royle, The Macmillan Companion to Scottish Literature

'One of the most important Scottish writers of the twentieth century.” – TLS

'Modern Scottish fiction reaches its highest peak in the novels of Neil M. Gunn… Like Hardy, and indeed Joyce… he transcends regionalism and acquires universality.' – The Scotsman

'Neil Gunn has given us a wonderful body of work…the greatest achievement of its kind in modern Scottish literature.' – Hugh MacDiarmid

'A brilliant novelist.' – Lewis Grassic Gibbon

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Neil Gunn (Author)

Neil Miller Gunn was born and brought up in Caithness, in the far north of Scotland, and continued to think and write about that part of the world, and to draw from it, and from the Highland landscape in general, for his entire writing life.

At the time of the publication of his many award-winning novels, stories and essays, he was regarded as one of the most important modernist writers working in Great Britain – with a reputation that resonated throughout Scotland and the world through the early to mid twentieth century and beyond.

This new selection of his republished work brings back the work of one of Scotland’s most influential and international authors.

Alan Riach, Professor of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow, is a poet, critic, and has contributed widely to newspapers, debates, and public discussions, championing the role of the arts in shaping Scotland’s sense of self and one of the leading interpreters of Scotland’s cultural imagination.