Introduced by J.B. Pick.

The Well at the World's End is a tour de force which plays with images and ideas in the search for philosophical truth. Taking as its anchor the concept of the well, it graduates from the physical to the mythical to the illusory and metaphorical, bringing us at last to a vision of the well as a source of personal power.

Peter is a man searching for his lost youth, and during the course of the novel he finds, if not youth itself, then spiritual rejuvenation. In a light-hearted search for the well at the world's end he wanders off among the hills, entering a realm of difference and different values people by Highlanders, each of whom unknowingly teach him about life and about himself.

Neil Gunn was born in 1891, son of a fishing boat skipper from Dunbeath in Caithness. He spent part of his boyhood in Galloway where he worked in the Excise service until 1937. He is widely recognised as one of the major figures of the Scottish Literary Renaissance.