Greenvoe is a tight-knit community on the Orcadian island of Hellya, unchanged for generations. A sinister military/industrial project, Operation Black Star, requires the island for unspecified purposes and threatens the islanders' way of life. In this, his first novel (1972), George Mackay Brown recreates a week in the life of the island community as they come to terms with the destructiveness of Operation Black Star. A whole host of characters - failed fisherman and Marxist The Skarf, boatman and ladies' man Ivan Westray, pious creeler Samuel Whaness, drunken fisherman Bert Kerston, earth-mother Alice Voar, and hard-drinking Timmy Folster - are brought to life in this mixture of prose and poetry.