The quarry wood

Nan Shepherd is famous today for her wonderful book exploring the Cairngorm mountains, The Living Mountain. This book, The Quarry Wood, came earlier and is s novel, concerning a protagonist Martha and her life going into university education.

The narrative flows very well, and the dialogue is brilliant, written in part in Scottish phonetic. However, the story doesn't ever really get going, and although it does describe an interesting set of characters and time, I found the book too slow to enjoy fully. It is more a poetic description of a time and place than a novel.

Interesting story, at times it is beautifully written when the landscape is being described, but it feels lacking the rest of the time.

A lot of the conversation in this book has been written with a thick Scottish accent and was fascinating to read, at times I had to get my wife to translate some parts but overall I managed to follow it ok.

I only read this book as I wanted to read the living mountain but the library only had this book by Nan Shepherd. I am glad I gave it a go as it hints at the living mountain as being a very good book.