Available Formats
Whisky Galore
By (Author) Compton Mackenzie
Birlinn General
Birlinn Ltd
18th September 2012
17th September 2012
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
823.912
Hardback
288
Width 135mm, Height 205mm, Spine 25mm
357g
It's 1943 and the war has brought rationing to the Hebridean islands of Great and Little Todday. When food is in short supply, it is bad enough, but when the whisky runs out, it looks like the end of the world. Morale is at rock bottom. George Campbell needs a wee dram to give him the courage to stand up to his mother and marry Catriona. The priest, the doctor and, of course, the landlord at the inn are all having a very thin time of it. There's no conversation, no jollity, no fun until a shipwreck off the coast brings a piece of extraordinary good fortune
Wartime food rationing is bad enough, but when the whisky supplies run out on the Hebridean islands of Great and Little Todday, nothing seems to go right. Then the fifty-thousand-bottle cargo of the shipwrecked S. S. Cabinet Minister brings salvation - in its most giddily intoxicating form.
Compton Mackenzie was born in West Hartlepool in 1883. He was educated at St Paul's School and Magdalen College, Oxford. During the First World War he became a Captain in the Royal Marines, becoming Director of the Aegean Intelligence Service. He wrote more than ninety books - novels, history and biography, essays and criticism, children's stories and verse, and was also an outstanding broadcaster. He founded and edited until 1961 the magazine the Gramophone, and was President of the Siamese Cat Club. He lived for many years on the island of Barra in the Outer Hebrides, but later settled in Edinburgh. Compton Mackenzie died in 1972.