Whisky and Scotland

A beautiful new gift edition of Neil M. Gunn’s classic celebration of malt whisky and its creators

Whisky and Scotland is a witty, erudite and lyrical toast to uisge beatha, the Celt’s ’water of life’. Taking readers on a journey through the Highlands of Scotland, it describes the traditional techniques whereby barley grains become an amber spirit.

Written by one of Scotland’s most acclaimed early twentieth-century novelists, Whisky and Scotland remains timely and relevant, encompassing nationalism, culture and what it means to be Scottish in its examination of the whisky tradition.

A classic since its original publication in 1935, this beautiful new gift edition of Whisky and Scotland will enlighten and entertain all who share the author’s delight in a brew that recalls ’the world of hills and glens, of raging elements, of shelter, of divine ease’.

Neil M. Gunn was a Scottish novelist, critic and dramatist. Born in the northernmost county of mainland Scotland in 1891, he began his career as a customs and excise officer and spent sixteen years working at the Glen Mhor Whisky Distillery. He wrote prolifically throughout his life, authoring over twenty novels, essays and works of non-fiction. In 1937 he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Highland River. Gunn is regarded as one of the most important Scottish authors of the early twentieth century and a leading light of the ’Scottish Renaissance’ of the 1920s and 30s. He died in 1973.