The House with the Green Shutters

In 1901, a young Scottish writer published a novel so furious it shattered the comfortable illusion of rural Scotland as a cozy idyll. George Douglas Brown had scores to settle: born illegitimate, rejected by his father from the village of Ochiltree, he poured his rage into this savage portrait of a man destroyed by his own pride. John Gourlay rules his household and his town with an iron will, his grand house with the green shutters a monument to his success as a carrier. But Gourlay's pride is a fragile thing, built on the envy he both craves and despises. When a rival returns from exile and the railway brings industrialization to Ayrshire, the foundations of his kingdom begin to crack. His family, his neurotic son, his frightened wife and daughter, have lived in the shadow of his ferocious temper for years. Now they must face what happens when the tyrant falls. Murder, suicide, ruin: Brown refuses to look away from the darkness. This is Scottish literature without the rose-tint, a brutal act of literary patricide that blew open the doors of the kailyard school and influenced an entire literary renaissance.