Consider the Lilies - Hardcover

Born on the Isle of Lewis in 1928, Iain Crichton Smith was educated there and at the University of Aberdeen. He published many collections of acclaimed verse, short stories and plays (some in Gaelic). A spell of National Service in the fifties he worked as an English teacher until his retirement in 1977. He was the recipient of many literary prizes, Scottish Arts Council Awards and fellowships, as well as the Queen's Jubilee Medal and an OBE. He died in 1998.

A simple but noble book ... this deserves to be read―The Scotsman

Restrained, finely wrought ... Crichton Smith shows us isolation, perplexity, loneliness, a combination of blindness and indifference―New Statesman

Iain Crichton Smith was, and is, lovingly acknowledged as one of modern Scotland's foremost writers ... Reading Iain Crichton Smith - like the author's own compulsion to write - is a hungry addiction ... The book posits, with absolute subtlety, the need for a compassionate, rather than a dogmatic, understanding of human needs: a message that is surely as important now as it ever was.―Kevin MacNeil, The List

Crichton Smith has an acute feeling for places and atmosphere. The wind-blown heaths, the grey skies, the black dwellings, the narrow lives, the poverty - are all vividly depicted ... one can linger over the sheer beauty of his phrases―Observer