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A writer's satirical travelogue about six years on the Orkney Islands has so enraged inhabitants of the Scottish archipelago that it has been shelved by his publisher Nicholas Brealey, after threats of legal action.
In Chucking It All: How Downshifting To A Windswept Scottish Island Did Absolutely Nothing to Improve My Life Max Scratchmann describes the inhabitants as "staid, emotionally repressed drunks, stuck in the 1950s". The book was due out 11th June, but is shown as "out of stock" on Amazon.co.uk.
According to the Independent, Scratchmann was told there had been a complaint about the book weeks before the final draft was due, and agreed to edit the offending sections. But he then received a letter from the publisher informing him of its decision to cancel the project.
Scratchmann is reported to have written that the Orkney landscape looked like an "alien planet in a classic episode of Star Trek". He unkindly recalled participating in drunken ceilidhs, discos and festivals, and meeting the local lotharios as well as the only gays on the archipelago.
Scratchmann is now so disillusioned with the book, which took two years to write, that he has "no plans" to seek another publisher.