Bucket of Tongues
1992 short story collection by Duncan McLean
Bucket of Tongues is a collection of twenty-three short stories by the Scottish writer Duncan McLean. Published in 1992, it was McLean's first book. McLean won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1993 for the collection.
Stories
Themes
Erich Hertz wrote in the Scottish Literary Review that Bucket of Tongues opens with an incident where a home has been broken into or is "perceived as in some way violated". Hertz argues that the break-in, or the imminent commination, and the "onslaught on domestic safety perpetrated by it, can be seen as symptomatic of a larger, all-embracing anxiety at a national level". He says there is a metaphor at play here, in that the "lack of security at the domicile portrays a similar concern about the lack of stability in the homeland [Scotland]".
Reviews
Publishers Weekly wrote that the "characters in these 23 short stories shiver through the night and squabble the day away" ... and that McLean's characters "wade through dire straits with the wide ironic grins of those whose facade of cockiness might at any moment crack". Overall, they opine that McClean's writing is "clean sober prose with sharp accurate descriptions of the natural world". Diana Casey of the Guide to Literary Masters & Their Works says this collection of short stories is "particularly intense and raw" ...
“Bucket of Tongues” enters the record as 1992 short story collection by Duncan McLean. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Bucket, Tongues and short can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4983030. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1992 and 1993.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bucket of Tongues” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.