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Magnus Merriman

by Eric Linklater

ISBN: 9780862413132
Imprint: Canongate Classics
Publication Date: Jan 2001
Format: Paperback
Price: £6.99
Stock Status: in stock

This hilarious novel charts the rise and fall (and perhaps the rise again) of Magnus Merriman – would-be lover, writer, politician, idealist and crofter – moved by dreams of greatness and a talent for farcical defeat. Convinced that ‘small nations are safer to live in that big ones’, Magnus becomes a Nationalist candidate for the parliamentary seat of ‘Kinluce’. With details based on Linklater’s own experiences in an East Fife by-election in 1933, the way is set for a satirical and irreverent portrait of Scottish life, literature and politics in the 1930s. Nothing is sacred and no-one is spared.

Eric Linklater (1899-1974) was born in Wales and educated in Aberdeen. His family came from the Orkney Islands. Linklater’s memories of Orkney and student life informed his first novel, White Maa’s Saga (1929), while the success of Poet’s Pub in the same year led him to take up writing as a full time career. Linklater enjoyed a long and popular career as a writer. His earlier years were described in The Man on my Back (1941), while a fuller autobiography, Fanfare for a Tin Hat, appeared in 1970.

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