The renowned poet Douglas Dunn shows a keen and humane eye for detail and a gift for memorable character creation in these stories of Scottish village life. South America humorously tells of a spirited woman who, when her husband goes to Brazil to further his career and stays away, decides to have two more children, adding to the two she already has by him. Although it's the 1940s, her village turns out to be not all a "valley of the squinting windows". There's also humour in the title story, although it refers to a way of life probably now long gone. The gentle bachelor narrator of The Canoes welcomes holidaymakers to his isolated area but he and the other natives, notably the boatman, Magee, are not above exploiting them for a few drinks. A sadder tone pervades the later stories, which feature characters revisiting their pasts, and the widow of a poet killed in the war (More Than Half the Way), who preserves his memory jealously and won't release any of his unpublished work, to the bewilderment of their son.
