Naomi Mitchison Books In Order

Novels

  1. The Conquered (1923)
  2. Cloud Cuckoo Land (1925)
  3. Black Sparta (1928)
  4. The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931)
  5. The Delicate Fire (1933)
  6. We have Been Warned (1935)
  7. The Bull Calves (1947)
  8. The Big House (1950)
  9. Travel Light (1952)
  10. The Land the Ravens Found (1955)
  11. To the Chapel Perilous (1955)
  12. Little Boxes (1956)
  13. Behold your King (1957)
  14. Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962)
  15. Ketse and the Chief (1965)
  16. When We Become Men (1965)
  17. The Big Surprise (1967)
  18. Don’t Look Back (1969)
  19. Family at Ditlabeng (1969)
  20. Far Harbour (1969)
  21. Graeme and the Dragon (1970)
  22. Sun and Moon (1970)
  23. Cleopatra’s People (1972)
  24. Sunrise Tomorrow (1973)
  25. Danish Teapot (1973)
  26. Oil for the Highlands? (1974)
  27. Solution Three (1975)
  28. Snake! (1976)
  29. The Two Magicians (1979)
  30. The Vegetable War (1980)
  31. The Barbarian (1980)
  32. Mucking Around (1981)
  33. Not by Bread Alone (1983)
  34. Images of Africa (1987)
  35. Early in Orcadia (1987)
  36. The Blood of the Martyrs (1988)
  37. The Oath-takers (1991)
  38. Sea-green Ribbons (1991)
  39. The Dark Twin (1998)

Omnibus

  1. Travel Light with the Varangs’ Saga (2009)

Collections

  1. When the Bough Breaks (1924)
  2. Beyond This Limit (1935)
  3. The Fourth Pig (1936)
  4. Five Men and a Swan (1957)
  5. What Do You Think Yourself (1982)

Non fiction

  1. Anna Comnena (1928)
  2. Alexander the Great (1964)
  3. African Heroes (1968)
  4. The Africans (1970)
  5. Small Talk (1973)
  6. A Life for Africa (1973)
  7. All Change Here (1975)
  8. You May Well Ask (1979)
  9. Among You Taking Notes… (1985)
  10. As It Was (1988)
  11. Rising Public Voice (1995)
  12. Vienna Diary 1934 (2009)

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Naomi Mitchison Books Overview

The Conquered

With The Conquered Mrs. Mitchison establishes herself as the best, if not the only, English historical novelist now writing. It seems to me in many respects the most attractive and poignant historical novel I have ever read’ A story of the Gauls under Caesar

Cloud Cuckoo Land

Rich and frank in passions, and rich, too, in the detail which helps to make feigned life seem real.’ Times Literary Supplement

Black Sparta

‘Her touch is sure, her description admirable. The reader gets a whiff of crushed thyme and of dew on dust as the author tells of Pindar’s poetic adventure into Thessaly’ TimesKeywords: Pindar Thessaly Whiff Thyme Admirable

The Corn King and the Spring Queen

Introduced by Naomi Mitchison. Set over two thousand years ago on the clam and fertile shores of the Black Sea, Naomi Mitchison’s The Corn King and the Spring Queen tells of ancient civilisations where tenderness, beauty and love vie with brutality and dark magic. Erif Der, a young witch, is compelled by her father to marry his powerful rival, Tarrik the Corn King, so becoming the Spring Queen. Forced by her father, she uses her magic spells to try and break Tarrik’s power. But one night Tarrik rescues Sphaeros, an Hellenic philosopher, from a shipwreck. Sphaeros in turn rescues Tarrik from near death and so breaks the enchantment that has bound him. And so begins for Tarrik a Quest a fabulous voyage of discovery which will bring him new knowledge and which will reunite him with his beautiful Spring Queen.

Travel Light

No one knows better how to spin a fairy tale than Naomi Mitchison. The Observer Read it now. Ursula K. Le Guin You will love this book. Holly Black From the dark ages to modern times, from the dragons of medieval forests to Constantinople, this is a fantastic and philosophical fairy tale journey that will appeal to fans of Harry Potter, Diana Wynne Jones, and T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone.

To the Chapel Perilous

Had journalists plied their trade in the days of King Arthur, how would they have reported breaking stories like the Quest for the Holy Grail? Or the love affair between Lancelot and Guinevere? Or the fall of the Round Table? In answering these intriguing questions, Naomi Mitchison offers keen and humorous insights into not only how the news is reported, but also how conflicting accounts of the Arthurian story may have grown. The resulting novel, To the Chapel Perilous, is a remarkable work of wit and style.

Behold your King

In this unusual and accomplished novel Naomi Mitchison retells in realistic terms and colloquial dialogue the story of the passion and death of Jesus, hour by hour, as it unfolds over the twenty four hours of Good Friday. In a restless Jerusalem under Roman occupation, political and personal agendas lead inexorably to the crucifixion, while the followers of Jesus his mother, the fishermen, young Mary of Magdala can only wait, unhappy and confused. Mitchison, probably inspired by the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 56, drew, in writing this novel, not only on the New Testament gospels but also on fragmentary or lost gospels and on tradition. Herself a humanist, she scrupulously presents ‘the historical Jesus’. But at the end of the novel, as the disciples keep watch by the garden tomb, she leaves the reader with a question: what happened next? Moira Burgess is a novelist, short story writer and literary historian who lives in Glasgow. She is the author of Mitchison’s Ghosts Humming Earth, 2008, on supernatural and mythical elements in the writing of Naomi Mitchison, and is working on a collected edition of Mitchison’s essays and journalism to be published by Kennedy & Boyd.

When We Become Men

Naomi Mitchison began her novel writing career in the 1920s, with historical fictions set in the Ancient world, in Roman and Greek civilisations, and soon won a high reputation world wide. But she began to move toward present and future as well as past: thus Lobsters on the Agenda 1952 dealt with contemporary Highland life. When in her sixties she began a lasting friendship with a young chief designate of the Bakgatla tribe, Linchwe, she went on to join the tribe, and was adopted as its Mother. She wrote only one adult novel about Botswana, When We Become Men 1965. This fine novel deals with the contemporary fight for equality across southern Africa, and the struggle against apartheid. It ends up projecting towards a future where fighting would be unnecessary. Her main character here is Isaac, a young man brought up in Pretoria, who believes in resistance to a white minority government, and, like Nelson Mandela, backs bloodless sabotage as a political weapon. He deeply distrusts the remnants of the tribal system, and the power of the chiefs. He meets Letlotse, young heir apparent to the Bakgatla, returning home from an expensive but sometimes bizarre or just irrelevant education in Britain. He distrusts old ways too, and is tempted towards national politics, away from the tribe. There are clashes of beliefs, and conflicting ideas and loyalties. There is violence here. There are rapes and murders, and some killings that the Africans regard rather as executions. Here is a vivid, clear account of a troubled people in transition, which helps the reader to understand and empathise with the birth pangs of a new, post Imperial, Africa. Isobel Murray is Emeritus Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen

Solution Three

As a fast paced novel about a future shaped by feminist ideals of sexual and racial equality, ‘Solution Three‘ at first seems to be a peaceful answer to the world’s problems. Homosexuality as an international norm and reproduction by cloning have minimized aggression and overpopulation. The sexes have equal rights and status, racial tension has been eliminated through genetic intermixing, and scientists work closely with the governing body, the Council, to keep an eye on the food supply and to heal the earth of prior environmental terrorism. Except in a few outlying areas, things seem to be going smoothly. But even in the privileged center, two women are quietly rebelling. Miryam, a geneticist, is secretly married and rearing her own children. Lilac, a surrogate mother chosen to carry a clone baby, tries to evade releasing him, as customary, for social conditioning. When a mysterious virus appears in distant wheat crops, when deviant sects kill a Council member and a Clone, when even the Clones exhibit unexpected sexual behaviour, Mutumba, the strong and wise leader of the Council, ponders whether the principle of diversity, essential to the food supply, might also hold for people. What is the cost to women of this new model for reproducing life? With Mutumba, and others, one wonders: is it time for a new solution a solution four? Originally published in 1975, Mitchison’s visionary science fiction presents a world created by both women and men that is far ahead of our own. ‘Like Herland, Solution Three imagines a society in which women have used reproductive control to shape a more equitable life for all, eradicating aggression and providing social support for motherhood…
Solution Three presents a new, more positive vision of science as a realm in which women could indeed make a difference, and shape the course of knowledge.’ From the Afterword by Susan M. Squier.

The Blood of the Martyrs

A new addition to the popular Christian Epics series. In a society where worshiping God is a crime punishable by death, and brutality to slaves is commonplace, Roman citizens Flavius Crispus and his son Beric struggle to become Christians and to treat their slaves as brothers and sisters in Christ.

When the Bough Breaks

Contents Include: The Hostages Vercingetorix and the Others: Cottia went to Bibtacte The Man from Alesia Got to put up with it Now The Triumph of Faith When the Bough Breaks A Note on some Books

Anna Comnena

Anna Comnena is described as the first female historian, the author of her father’s celebratory biography. She was an educated princess in eleventh century Constantinople, the daughter of the Emperor Alexius. She was expected to succeed him, and raised as heir, but her hopes were dashed by the birth of a younger brother. In what is over modestly described as a biography, Naomi Mitchison combines her story with that of her father, and the whole civilisation of the Eastern Empire, indeed the whole known world of the time. The Eastern Empire is seen as a necessary bulwark between a young and promising Europe and the perils of Islam and wild tribes in Asia. Mitchison also warns her readership of the perils of a dead civilisation, and writing in 1928 she poses a challenge to the direction of Europe in these perilous postwar years. Thwarted ambition at last drove Anna to attempt to kill her brother, who, says Mitchison, went on to be one of the best of Emperors. Isobel Murray is Emeritus Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen.

Small Talk

Small Talk
avoids the temptation of a full blown ‘My Life and Times’ type of autobiography and presents instead a recreation of childhood years in Oxford before the First World War a child’s eye view of the family, the friends, the servants, the pets and the holidays in Scotland and Cornwall that made up that childhood. It is as much concerned with her own development as an amateur field botanist as with the occasions when the adult world intruded, when ‘Uncle Richard’ Lord Haldane might lead the younger members of the family out to the wash house to watch the messy business of heating wax to take the impression of the Great Seal of England. If Lord Baden Powell and Andrew Lang appear briefly, it is less as famous figures of the period, but rather as irritating visitors with passions either for tying knots or talking about fairies who interrupted the pleasures of raiding the kitchen garden for fruit, or reading at night behind the curtains of the drawing room. There are glimpses of her reactions to scientific theories, as they reached her in repercussions from her father’s work, and to the High Tory politics of her formidable mother. Small Talk
is a precise, vivid picture of the people and manners of a world which has receded so rapidly that it is now further from the experience of people today as the other side of the moon. In another sense, though, it is a timeless picture of childhood itself. The introductory essay by Ali Smith ‘The Woman From The Big House’ was first first published in Chapman 50.

Among You Taking Notes…

Naomi Mitchison, Scotland’s grand old lady of literature and celebrated left wing political thinker, kept a wartime diary at the request of Mass Observation, a social research agency. From the day Hitler invaded Poland to the day America dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, she recorded this picture of how one extraordinary family and their friends lived…
and what actually happened. ‘She writes enviably, with the kind of casual precision which…
comes by grace.’ Times Literary Supplement. ‘…
as in a good novel, the people, their feelings and reactions are instantly recognizable and as fresh and immediate today as they were then.’ Emma Tennant, Guardian.

Rising Public Voice

Leaders from 30 countries reveal the problems, sacrifices, rewards, and realities of women in public life.

Vienna Diary 1934

On February 24th, 1934 shortly after the civil war in Austria and the defeat of the Socialists Naomi Mitchison left Eng land on a visit to Vienna in order to do what she could to relieve the terrible distress of the defeated. In this day by day diary she tells us what she saw, did and felt: and the whole forms at once what is called a ‘human document’ of rare poignancy and dramatic interest, and a book of some historical import ance. ‘Very few people have both money and leisure and the will to do this. I’ve got this because of my profession. I rang up V ictor G ollancz on Monday evening, and asked if he’d give me an advance on a very hypothetical book about it. He said he would, and I’m going on that. I couldn’t have otherwise. Simply as an observer I shall be some use; it’s the one thing I’m sure I can do well, though I don’t think I’m a good analyser. What I should like to do is to write a full diary every day, as truthful as it can possibly be. I shall type it on both sides of the sheet, so that it will fold small, and shall try and leave a duplicate with somebody if I get my copy through, they can destroy theirs. But perhaps the whole thing is moonshine; perhaps there won’t be anything to write down! If so, looking back on this afternoon from whenever it is in the future, I shall see myself looking a perfect fool. However, that won’t be the first time ! Anyway, for what it’s worth. I feel all thrilled now, screwed up like a child going to play Indians. Perhaps I shall be more grown up by the end of it.’

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