Summer of the red wolf - Morris West (First edition)

This is a story of two men and two women in the Outer Hebrides, the far islands where the land falls into the sea and there is nothing between the last crags and the coast of America.

At first glance it is a very simple story of love, rivalry, brotherhood and epic violence. At second glance it is something else, an evocation in the form of a novel of the flight of modern man from a civilisation which has grown too complex for its frail spirit. This is what the author himself said of it when he delivered the manuscript: "I was dead, barren, caught in the grip of that destructive ennui which the Greeks called 'accidie'. I wanted to retreat into the womb of time, to a possibly unattainable simplicity, so I took ship to the outer Hebrides. It was a strange, solitary journey into my own Celtic past, a dangerous journey because I felt that at any moment I might lose myself in a strangeness for which I was not prepared. Then, by some magic of the place and people, I was preserved. 

I went through a saving and regenerative experience which is expressed in symbol and in fiction in this book. Unlike any other book I've ever written, it is far removed from the arguments with which I have been involved too long and too often. It is a recall of the simple primitive adventure of being alive and battling, not with an impersonal civilisation, but with the elements and with elemental man.