A Time To Keep

This collection of short stories was first published in 1969 and won the Scottish Arts Council Literature Prize. It is generally agreed that this book contains some of George Mackay Brown's best writing. The poet Charles Causley wrote, "I haven’t read so absorbing a set of stories - and with such a rare and splendid sanity about them - for years.” The Guardian review described him as a “precise, poetic, and dazzling writer.”

Three of the nine stories in the book: A Time to Keep, The Whaler’s Return and Celia were adapted into television plays and shown on Play for Today in 1971. They aroused controversy among Orcadians as they were presented under the title ‘Orkney’ and it was felt they showed the islands in an unflattering light. The main complaint was that ‘Celia’, in which Hannah Gordon played a young alcoholic, was described as being set in the present but the house was lit by an oil lamp.

Paperback, 182 pages

Published 1969, re-printed 2006

ISBN 190549865X

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Celia describes the effect of her first drink
‘It’s hard to explain what happened next. I knew who I was before I took that drink - a poor girl in an ordinary house on a fisherman’s pier. I stood there holding an empty glass in my hand. A door was opening deep inside me and I looked through it into another country. I stood between the two places, confused and happy and excited. I still wore Celia’s clothes but the clothes were all a disguise, bits of fancy dress, a masquerade. You know the ballad about the Scottish King who went out in the streets of Edinburgh in bonnet and tradesman’s apron? I wore the clothes of a poor girl but I was wise, rich, great, gentle, good.'

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