Inverness The Barefoot Years

"God's Country," is the best way to describe Inverness, during the '60s. If was a safe place filled with wonder and natural beauty. While reading Inverness; The Barefoot Years, take a break and close your eyes. See if you can remember chasing lightning bugs at dusk or the smell after a spring rain. Can you still hear the whistle of the midnight train or remember running barefoot on the school play ground. I hope this book brings you a flood of great childhood memories. If I had one wish it would be to turn back the hands of time so our children or grandchildren could live as we did, a carefree, innocent childhood.

"God's Country," is the best way to describe Inverness, during the '60s. If was a safe place filled with wonder and natural beauty. While reading Inverness; The Barefoot Years, take a break and close your eyes. See if you can remember chasing lightning bugs at dusk or the smell after a spring rain. Can you still hear the whistle of the midnight train or remember running barefoot on the school play ground. I hope this book brings you a flood of great childhood memories. If I had one wish it would be to turn back the hands of time so our children or grandchildren could live as we did, a carefree, innocent childhood.

Katharine Stewart, who died in 2013, was one of Scotland's best-loved writers on rural life in the Highlands. A Croft in the Hills, her first book, tells the story of how a couple and their young daughter, fresh from city life, took over a remote hill croft near Loch Ness and made a living from it. Full of warm personal insights, good humour and a love of living things, it has become a classic and has rarely been out of print since it was first published in 1960. This omnibus gathers A Croft in the Hills together with some of Katharine's later books: A Garden in the Hills, describing a year in the life of her Highland garden; A School in the Hills, a vivid history of the school at Abriachan which eventually became the Stewarts' family home; and The Post in the Hills, which tells the dramatic story of the postal service in the Highlands, from the point of view of Katharine's later role as postmistress of the smallest post office in Scotland, run from the porch of her Abriachan schoolhouse. Each of these books glows with what Neil Gunn described as 'its unusual quality, its brightness and its wisdom'. The omnibus will bring the grace, charm and wisdom of Katharine Stewart's writing to a new generation of readers.

How could he be a good boy and a bad boy at the same time? The TRUTH is what is. FICTION is not reality—but it can help us to see the TRUTH through stories, e.g., The Boy Who Cried Wolf. LIES deceive, for evil purposes, and for good purposes. But what happens when what we think is the TRUTH turns out to be a LIE? In his ninth decade, the author, who has spent his life creating FICTION to examine TRUTH, decided to write the story of his life, truthfully. But, in the process of examining his life—his prayers, works, joys and sufferings—he discovers it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish the TRUTH from the LIES. And the chief insights into the reality of a life he thought noble, his FICTION—often in the form of dreams—reveals his true nature as a failure in his professed faith—until a good woman shows him the way out of his dark forest.

Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands and Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides form a natural pair for an OWC because both books, often read and taught alongside each other, focus on the Scottish highlands.