Grey granite - Lewis Grassic Gibbon

Chris Guthrie and her son, Ewan, have come to the industrial town of
Duncairn, where life is as hard as the granite of the buildings all
around them. These are the Depression years of the 1930s, and Chris is
far from the fields of her youth in Sunset Song. In a society of
factory owners, shopkeepers, policemen, petty clerks and industrial
labourers, 'Chris Caledonia' must make her living as bets she can by
working in Ma Cleghorn's boarding house.

Ewan finds employment in
a steel foundry and tries to lead a peaceful strike against the
manufacture of armaments. In the face of violence and police brutality,
his socialist idealism is forged into something harder and fiercer as he
becomes a communist activist ready to sacrifice himself, his girlfriend
and even the truth itself, for the cause.

Grey Granite is the last and grimmest volume of the Scots Quair trilogy. Chris Guthrie is one of the great characters in Scottish Literature and no reader of Sunset Song and Cloud Howe should miss this last rich chapter in her tale.