A Scots Quair: Sunset Song, Cloud Howe, Grey Granite
10 best books like A Scots Quair: Sunset Song, Cloud Howe, Grey Granite (Lewis Grassic Gibbon): Docherty (Coronet Books), Murder of a Lady, Border Country, The First Blast of the Trumpet, Culloden, Albigenses, The Monastery, The Silver Darlings, No Mean City, Consider the Lilies
| Author | William McIlvanney |
| ISBN | 0340407573 |
His face made a fist at the world. The twined remnant of umbilicus projected vulnerably. Hands, feet and prick. He had come equipped for the job.
Newborn Conn Docherty, raw as a fresh wound, lies between his parents in their tenement room, with no birthright but a life's labour in the pits of his...
| Author | Anthony Wynne |
| ISBN | 0712356231 |
Duchlan Castle is a gloomy, forbidding place in the Scottish Highlands. Late one night the body of Mary Gregor, sister of the laird of Duchlan, is found in the castle. She has been stabbed to death in her bedroom - but the room is locked from within and the windows are barred. The only tiny clue to the culprit...
| Author | Raymond Williams |
| ISBN | 1902638816 |
What a beautiful book. It took me some time to get into it, but as I got used to the pace it began to dig deeply into my psyche. At some point I began to realise that this could well have been the autobiographical voice of my father, who became an academic, and who's own father was a signalman. It's billed as being...
The First Blast of the Trumpet
| Author | Marie Macpherson |
| ISBN | 1908483210 |
Hailes Castle, 1511. Midnight on a doom-laden Hallowe'en and Elisabeth Hepburn, feisty daughter of the Earl of Bothwell, makes a wish ― to wed her lover, the poet David Lindsay. But her uncle has other plans. To safeguard the interests of the Hepbum family she is to become a nun and succeed her aunt as...
| Author | John Prebble |
| ISBN | 0712668209 |
This is the story of ordinary men and women involved in the Rebellion, who were described on the gaol registers and regimental rosters of the time as 'Common Men'. There is little in this book about Bonnie Prince Charlie and other principals of the last Jacobite Rising of 1745. Culloden recalls them by...
| Author | Charles Robert Maturin |
Un gran novelón gótico. Con Maturin ya sabes que te puedes esperar: páginas y páginas de historias que se entremezclan entre sí y que están tan bien narradas que son capaces de llevarte al tiempo y lugar donde sucedieron. Las descripciones del autor son muy precisas y al igual que con Melmoth la...
| Author | Walter Scott |
| ISBN | 1406932531 |
Set on the eve of the Protestant Reformation in Scotland, The Monastery is full of supernatural events, theological conflict, and humor. Located in the lawless Scottish Borders, the novel depicts the monastery of Kennaquhair (a thinly disguised Melrose Abbey, whose ruins are still to be seen near...
| Author | Neil M. Gunn |
| ISBN | 0571200788 |
This 1941 novel is what you may choose as a holiday book or, as I did, to read its near 600 pages over the Christmas period. First and foremost it’s one of those lovely warm stories to become immersed in, unworried about its cleverness or literary wit. Easy to hold up as an example of the ‘classic realist...
| Author | A. McArthur |
| ISBN | 0552075833 |
No book is more associated with the city of Glasgow than No Mean City. First published in 1935, it is the story of Johnnie Stark, son of a violent father and a downtrodden mother, the 'Razor King' of Glasgow's pre-war slum underworld, the Gorbals. The savage, near-truth descriptions, the raw character...
| Author | Iain Crichton Smith |
| ISBN | 0753812932 |
The Highland Clearances, the eviction of crofters from their homes between 1792 and the 1850s, was one of the cruellest episodes in Scotland's history. In Consider the Lilies, Iain Crichton Smith captures its impact through the thoughts and memories of an old woman who has lived all her life within...
Michael Pendreich is curating an exhibition of photographs by his late, celebrated father Angus for the National Gallery of Photography in Edinburgh. The show will cover fifty years of Scottish life but, as he arranges the images and writes his catalogue essay, what story is Michael really trying...
| Author | George Douglas Brown |
| ISBN | 1419166867 |
Published in 1901 and described by George Douglas Brown as a brutal and bloody work , this bestselling classic was a furious response to what Brown called sentimental slop the representation of Scotland as a cozy rural idyll. It is probably semi-autobiographical Brown was illegitimate and rejected...
| Author | George Mackay Brown |
Greenvoe, the tight-knit community on the Orcadian island of Hellya, has existed unchanged for generations. However, 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...
| Author | John Galsworthy |
| ISBN | 0766194345 |
Back when I was a kid I read THE FORSYTE SAGA and then, in due course, A MODERN COMEDY. The first trilogy is all about Soames and Irene, whereas the second trilogy deals with Soames' daughter Fleur and her husband, Michael Mont. Many readers have rated the second trilogy as inferior to the first, but in my...
This is the world of universal future war. Faced with the threat of bombs, bacteriological warfare and poison gas, a married couple whose pacificism complels them to opt out of 'civilisation', take to the hills to live as fugitives in the wild.
Plainly and simply told, Wild Harbour charts the...
The Redemption of Alexander Seaton
| Author | Shona MacLean |
| ISBN | 1847245056 |
This was a solid and enjoyable historical mystery set in Scotland in 1626. The main hero, Alexander Seaton, is a disgraced would-be minister of the Church of Scotland who is obsessed with guilt and tormented by his lack of faith. He's certainly a compelling character and I grew to like him more and more...
| Author | Compton Mackenzie |
| ISBN | 0140292985 |
The ancient clan spirit is not yet dead in the Scottish highlands, with Donald MacDonald of Ben Nevis ruling the roost at wild, craggy Glenbogle Castle. Woe betide those who trespass on this Chieftain's kingdom...
So when a hapless bunch of Sassenach hikers invades the glens, camping on Ben...
| Author | James Thomson |
| ISBN | 1905432194 |
I'm browsing Thomson's work on internet sites, not this edition. He was a nineteenth century Scottish writer, a depressive alcoholic who has been compared with Poe. I read 'The City of Dreadful Night' from a Project Gutenberg portal. It's an account of a Wasteland and a City (based, apparently, upon...
| Author | Andrew Greig |
| ISBN | 1847249965 |
I should like you to fish for me at the Loch of the Green Corrie,' MacCaig commanded months before his death. 'Go to Lochinver and ask for a man named Norman MacAskill - if he likes you he may tell you where it is. If you catch a fish, I shall be delighted. If you fail, then looking down from a place in which I do...
| Author | Kathleen Jamie |
| ISBN | 0954221745 |
It's surprising what you can find by simply stepping out to look. Kathleen Jamie, award winning poet, has an eye and an ease with the nature and landscapes of Scotland as well as an incisive sense of our domestic realities. In Findings she draws together these themes to describe travels like no other contemporary...
| Author | Reay Tannahill |
| ISBN | 0312253869 |
Returning from the sophisticated French court to take up her throne in cold and backward Scotland, 18-year-old Mary finds herself trapped in a web of ambitions and intrigues: those of her self-righteous brother, James, who desires to rule in her place; of her brilliant Secretary of State, Lethington,...
| Author | Andy Wightman |
| ISBN | 1841589608 |
Who Owns Scotland? How did they get it? What happened to all the common land in Scotland? Has the Scottish Parliament made any difference? Can we get our common good land back? In The Poor Had No Lawyers, Andy Wightman, author of Who Owns Scotland, updates the statistics of landownership in Scotland and...
| Author | James Kelman |
| ISBN | 1857990358 |
Living in a no-bedroomed tenement flat, coping with the cold and boredom of busconducting and the bloody-mindedness of Head Office, knowing that emigrating to Australia is only an impossible dream, Robert Hines finds life to be 'a very perplexing kettle of coconuts'. The compensations are a wife...
