BLACK FRIDAY: Peter Aitchison's acclaimed community history is about the Eyemouth Disaster of 1881 when 19 boats were lost and 129 men drowned in an autumn storm. It's also a history of the town's dependence on the undependable
shoals . Two weeks after the disaster the depleted fleet returned to sea, some boats with names which have passed down to today.
A STRANGER ON THE BARS: Christian Watt Marshall, born in Broadsea, Fraserburgh, in 1896, wrote these memoirs in her eighties. It's a wonderfully direct, un-literary remembering. In the years before the First World War Christian, age 14, became one of thousands of Scottish herring lassies, travelling seasonally down the coast from Shetland to Yarmouth to gut and pack fish. Wet, cold, back-breaking work, but there was freedom, music and laughter, and few regrets.
HELLFIRE AND HERRING A brilliant re-creation of a vanished way of life. Christopher Rush writes of his childhood in St Monans in the 1940s and 1950s, "a fossilised fishing village on Scotland's repressed east coast where fishing was an act of faith". The prose is as memorable as the memories are rich in detail and informed by a poet's eye.
THE SILVER DARLINGS: This is Neil Gunn's longest and most popular novel. His home town of Dunbeath, Caithness, is Dunster in this epic, based on research into the growth of the herring industry after the Highland Clearances in the late 19th century. Local characters, landscapes, the thrill and danger of the sea, accompany the inner journey of his hero, Finn, from boyhood to maturity. Gunn blends realism with myth and metaphysics.
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