Beside the Ocean of Time - Hardcover

George Mackay Brown

4.16

616 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0719553687 ISBN 13: 9780719553684

Publisher: John Murray, 1994

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In this novel set on the fictitious island of Norday in the Orkneys, George Mackay Brown beckons us into the imaginary world of the young Thorfinn Ragnarson, the son of a crofter. In his day-dreams he relives the history of this island people, travelling back in time to join Viking adventurers at the court of the Byzantine Emperor in Constantinople, then accompanying a Falstaffian knight to the battle of Bannockburn.;Thorfinn wakes to the twentieth century and a community whose way of life, steeped in legend and tradition, has remained unchanged for centuries. But as the boy grows up - and falls in love with a vivacious and mysterious stranger - the transforming effect of modern civilization brings momentous and irreversible changes to the island. During the Second World War Thorfinn finds himself in a German prisoner-of-war camp, and it is here that he discovers his gifts as a writer. Long afterwards he returns, now a successful novelist, to a deserted and battle-scarred island. Searching for the peace and freedom of mind he had in abundance as a child, he finds instead something he didn't even know he was looking for.;George Mackay Brown intertwines myth and reality to create a novel of deceptive simplicity. The story of Thorfinn and the island of Norday is a universal and profound one, rooted in the timeless landscape of the Orkneys, the inspiration of all his writing.

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Book Description:

In this novel set on the fictitious island of Norday in the Orkneys, the author takes the reader into the imaginary world of the young Thorfinn Ragnarson, the son of a crofter. The author describes his daydreams of the past and goes on to explore his path through life.

From the Back Cover:

Thorfinn, a crofter's son living on the remote island of Norday, is a dreamy boy ; 'idle and useless' according to his teachers. Bored by school, happier wandering the shores of his island home, he escapes into the limitless world of his imagination. Closing his eyes in the 1930s he dreams of crossing the 'fish-fraught' ocean with Viking raiders. Falling asleep to the monotonous tones of a history lesson he finds himself running from the press gang into the arms of a beautiful seal-maiden who longs to return to the sea. War and adventure, the struggles of great men and the everyday toil of the fisherfolk, Thorfinn dreams the sweep of Norday's history, its life and its inevitable death...

"His finest novel yet: we are reading this author at the height of his powers."
THE TIMES

"The great ocean of time has been more widely sailed and more deeply trawled by George Mackay Brown than by any other writer in Scottish literature. Rich in poetry, emblazoned with marvellous imagery...a millennial reach in which every heron and seal is the embodiment of all its predecessors, every fisherman a descendant of those who harvested the same waters before him."
GLASGOW HERALD

"...mythic stories that affirm the human spirit, clad in a prose of sinuous beauty. George Mackay Brown remains one of our truly inimitable novelists."
DAILY TELEGRAPH

"...richness and colour, wonderful prose and imagery, and through it all you breathe the peat smoke of the croft, the wip of the wind which beats up the spray of the northern seas. A Mackay Brown novel is an event to be savoured, to be read over and over again for its subtleties. It is a joy."
EDINBURGH EVENING NEWS

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