'Letters from Hamnavoe was first published in 1975, but time has not diminished its pleasure ... There is humour, wit, a playful -- sometimes self-mocking -- irony in many of these letters ... There is also pure poetry ... George Mackay Brown writes without sentimentality or quaintness of this unfamiliar, northern region, and his reminiscences of boyhood and narratives of past Orkney life are never nostalgic.'
-- Margery Palmer McCulloch, TLS

'A delight in content and presentation. It offers another window into GMB's Orcadian soul ... This little collection, a mixture of the simple and the significant, the mundane and the metaphysical, is a treasure trove to grace the bedside table.'
-- Ron Ferguson, The Herald

'This welcome paperback edition will bring his writing to a new generation of readers ... readers of Letters from Hamnavoe do not need to be from Orkney to appreciate these elegant, finely-crafted short essays ... There is much good reading here about this and that, and a hundred or more other things ... These Letters are sprinkled with dry humour, and are rich in the apt phrase ... George Mackay Brown thought that perhaps a selection of these writings might make "a pleasant bedside book": they do, and more.'
-- Helen Cook, The Scots Magazine

'All aspects of Orkney life: people and places, past, present, home, abroad, anything that touched on Orkney or on his particular interest or mood on the day he was writing. What I found really surprising is that none of it is mundane ... It seemed an ideal book to dip into ... I soon found myself reading the entries in chronological order and then found myself reading it almost as a narrative'
-- Manus McGeehan, Cencrastus