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The Rhynie Station: Grunnit Spring by Ian R. Mitchell

A novel is written entirely in Doric, the North-east dialectal variant of the Scots language.

Grunnit Spring is written in the format of one of the Seven Stories, in this case using that of The Return as its theme. It is recounted by an exile of long standing coming back, but not home, to the town of his roots, reflecting on the past and its relationship to the present as he travels. Serious and humorous by turns Grunnit Spring deals with the aspirations and hopes of the generation formed in and by the events of the 1960s, and with their subsequent divergent paths taken, paths which reunite at the funeral of one of their members.

A valediction to the idealism of youth and a crossing of the shadow line to the realities of maturity, Grunnit Spring casts an insightful retrospective gaze onto the social and political world of the second half of the twentieth century. The novel is written entirely in Doric, the North-east dialectal variant of the Scots language. Grunnit Spring aims to show that this can be used to deal with not just folkish and comic issues, but is also resilient and flexible enough to deal with those of a serious social and intellectual nature.

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Ian R Mitchell, born in Aberdeen and a native Doric speaker, is a well established author of more than twenty books. These include classics of mountaineering writing such as Mountain Days and Bothy Nights, and historical works such as Walking Though Glasgow’s Industrial Past. He has also written two novels, Winter in Berlin and Ghost Dance and a volume of short stories The Mountain Weeps. Some of the chapters of Grunnit Spring have previously been published in Lallans, the magazine of the Scots Language Society.

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