In childhood there is no distinction between, boy, bird, mammal or fish. A Twelvemonth and a Day is about change and growth, the fluctuating patterns in the worklife of a fishing and farming community throughout the whole cycle of a year, and about the year itself, the life of nature. It tells of how that symbolic year-and-a-day can be destroyed by forces we cannot seem to control - ignorance and greed, profit and loss, the wider forces of ploitics that damage communities and individuals. It is both a lament for a past time and acelebration of its vanished values.

Chosen by The List magazine as one of the 100 Best Scottish Books of All Time.

About the Author

Christopher Rush was born in 1944 in St Monans, a fishing village in the East Neuk of Fife. He was educated there and at Waid Academy in Anstruther, before going on to read English at the University of Aberdeen. There he excelled as a scholar and was an English Medal winner. He has since won five Scottish Arts Council Bursaries, two SAC Book Awards and was short-listed for the McVitie's Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year. Between 1969 and 1999 he taught English at George Watson's College, Edinburgh.

A Twelvemonth and a Day was first published in 1985 and is a semi-autobiographical account of the first twelve years of a boy's life, about the golden days before experience imposes itself and limits exploration of the world. In 2005 it was chosen by The List magazine as one of the 100 Best Scottish Books of All Time. It has also been made into a highly successful film, Venus Peter (1988), for which Rush co-wrote the screenplay.
Rush's many other publications include a poetry collection, A Resurrection of a Kind (1984), two short story collections, Peace Comes Dropping Slow (1983) and Into the Ebb (1989), two novels, Last Lesson of the Afternoon (1994), Will (2007), a children's book, Venus Peter Saves the Whale (1992), and two volumes of memoirs, To Travel Hopefully: Journal of a Death Not Foretold (2005) and Hellfire and Herring (2007). He is currently working on his third novel, Penelope's Web: Odysseus Unravelled.

Reviews
With its Bible-size characters, its feeling for workaday rhythms and the cycle of seasons, its tall and grisly tales of storms and wrecks, whales and sharks, witches and fetches, drownings and exhumations, it does convey a sense of that fatalistic awe which the sea inspired in those deeply devout fishing communities. * * Times Literary Supplement * *
. . . a magical memory of childhood . . . powerful, vivid, evocative, funny, awesome, loving and so assured in its writing it catches the breath. * * Glasgow Herald * *



Book Information
ISBN 9780862414399
Author Christopher Rush
Format Paperback
Page Count 320
Imprint Canongate Books
Publisher Canongate Books
Weight(grams) 208g
Dimensions(mm) 196mm * 126mm * 19mm