My third nomination is
Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon from Scotland. We've read many Irish and English books, but I can't recall any of our previous selections set in Scotland. Voted the "Best Scottish Book of All Time" by the public in 2005.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/4189430.stm
From Goodreads:
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Young Chris Guthrie comes of age in the harsh landscape of northern Scotland, torn between her passion for the land, her duty to her family and her love of books, until the First World War begins and the landscape around her changes dramatically. The first novel in Gibbon's classic trilogy A Scots Quair, Sunset Song marks the emotional and political changes that history and the coming of industrialization bring to Chris and the small farming community to which she belongs. Gibbon's book, an innovative display of passion and striking formal originality, blends Scots and English into an intense evocation of Scottish life in the early twentieth century.
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Scottish writer James Leslie Mitchell also wrote under the pseudonym of Lewis Grassic Gibbon.
Born in Auchterless and raised in Arbuthnott, then in Kincardineshire, Mitchell started working as a journalist for the Aberdeen Journal and the Scottish Farmer at age 16. In 1919 he joined the Royal Army Service Corps and served in Iran, India and Egypt before enlisting in the Royal Air Force in 1920. In the RAF he worked as a clerk and spent some time in the Middle East. He married Rebecca Middleton in 1925, with whom he settled in Welwyn Garden City. He began writing full-time in 1929. Mitchell wrote numerous books and shorter works under both his real name and nom de plume before his early death in 1935 of peritonitis brought on by a perforated ulcer.
Mitchell attracted attention from his earliest attempts at fiction, notably from H. G. Wells, but it was his trilogy entitled A Scots Quair, and in particular its first book Sunset Song, with which he made his mark. A Scots Quair with its combination of realist narrative and lyrical use of dialect is considered to be among the defining works of 20th century Scottish Renaissance.
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