Beside the Ocean of Time
10 best books like Beside the Ocean of Time (George Mackay Brown): The Bird of Night, Headlong, Pascali's Island, The Deposition of Father McGreevy, Under the Frog, The Hiding Place, The Lighthouse Stevensons: The extraordinary story of the building of the Scottish lighthouses by the ancestors of Robert Louis Stevenson, Flying to Nowhere, The Keepers of Truth, A Disaffection
| Author | Susan Hill |
| ISBN | 0140040722 |
Francis Croft, the greatest poet of his age, was mad. His world was a nightmare of internal furies and haunting poetic vision. Harvey Lawson watched and protected him until his final suicide. From his solitary old age Harvey writes this brief account of their twenty years together and then burns all...
| Author | Michael Frayn |
| ISBN | 0571225586 |
The combined smell of mildew, old food and wet dog was about to make me heave undigested pot roast, when our host had finally gotten around to telling us why he invited us to dinner.
“I heard you were something of a comic book aficionado and wanted your opinion on something.”
I eyed...
| Author | Barry Unsworth |
| ISBN | 0393317218 |
The year is 1908, the place, a small Greek island in the declining days of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. For twenty years Basil Pascali has spied on the people of his small community and secretly reported on their activities to the authorities in Constantinople. Although his reports are never acknowledged,...
| Author | Brian O'Doherty |
| ISBN | 1885983395 |
In a London pub in the 1950s, editor William Maginn is intrigued by a reference to the reputedly shameful demise of a remote mountain village in Kerry, Ireland, where he was born. Maginn returns to Kerry and uncovers an astonishing tale: both the account of the destruction of a place and a way of life which...
| Author | Tibor Fischer |
| ISBN | 0312278713 |
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Under the Frog follows the adventures of two young Hungarian basketball players through the turbulent years between the end of World War II and the anti-Soviet uprising of 1956. In this spirited indictment of totalitarianism, the two improbable heroes, Pataki and...
| Author | Trezza Azzopardi |
| ISBN | 0802138594 |
A finalist for the prestigious Man Booker Prize, The Hiding Place -- Welsh novelist Trezza Azzopardi's lyrical tale of an immigrant family in Cardiff -- has been compared to Frank McCourt's bleak, stirring memoir Angela's Ashes. But The Hiding Place need not "hide" behind any ready-made comparisons;...
| Author | Bella Bathurst |
| ISBN | 0006530761 |
I for one had no idea that the 14 lighthouses dotting the Scottish coast were all built by the same Stevenson family that produced Robert Louis Stevenson, Scotland's most famous novelist. But Bella Bathurst throws a powerful, revolving light into the darkness of this historical tradition.
Robert...
| Author | John Fuller |
| ISBN | 0907540279 |
Rating: 4.5* of five
The Publisher Says: Flying to Nowhere is a modern Gothic novel with spiritual overtones that open out a set of classic novelistic quests. Set on a remote Welsh island during the Middle Ages, the tale is woven around two main characters&emdash;Vane, an emissary sent...
| Author | Michael Collins |
| ISBN | 0743218035 |
The last of a manufacturing dynasty in a dying industrial town, Bill lives alone in the family mansion and works for the "Truth," the moribund local paper. He yearns to write long philosophical pieces about the American dream gone sour, not the flaccid write-ups of bake-off contests demanded by the...
| Author | James Kelman |
| ISBN | 0330307363 |
Patrick Doyle is a 29-year-old teacher in an ordinary school. Disaffected, frustrated and increasingly bitter at the system he is employed to maintain, Patrick begins his rebellion, fuelled by drink and his passionate, unrequited love for a fellow teacher. A Disaffection is the apparently straightforward...
| Author | Nicholas Mosley |
| ISBN | 1564784657 |
"The object of life is impossible; one cuts out fabrication and creates reality. A mirror is held to the back of the head and one's hand has to move the opposite way from what was intended."
In these closing lines from Impossible Object, one has embodied both Nicholas Mosley's subject of love...
| Author | Andrew Greig |
| ISBN | 0571212859 |
What a wonderful book this is, one of those that lingers with you long after you’ve finished reading it. It’s got a deep melancholy running through it but also lots of passion, love, and light(ish)-hearted comment on Scotland’s east/west divide. Author Andrew Greig has published books on mountaineering,...
| Author | Andrew O'Hagan |
| ISBN | 0771068352 |
First Canadian publication of the powerful debut novel from the author of Be Near Me.
Finalist for the Man Booker Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the Whitbread Award.
Hugh Bawn was a modern hero, a visionary urban planner, a man of the people who revolutionized...
| Author | Michael Ignatieff |
| ISBN | 0374527695 |
At the heart of Michael Ignatieff's riveting novel about a woman's descent into Alzheimer's are the tangled threads of a Midwestern family, frayed by time and tragedy yet still connected - as much by pride, embarrassed love, and sibling rivalry as by the painful ties of family loyalty. More than a tale...
At the midpoint of his life, Jerry Marlow finds himself on a bus from Milan to Strasbourg, taking stock of the wreckage strewn behind him -- a failed marriage, a daughter going astray, and an affair that has left him both numb and licking every wound, self-inflicted or otherwise. Even his teaching job...
| Author | Shena Mackay |
| ISBN | 0749394064 |
When Percy and Betty Harlency abandon their seedy Streatham pub, for the Copper Kettle Tearoom in Kent, life for their daughter April changes dramatically. She is befriended by the wonderfully dangerous Ruby, whose red hair and brutal home life emphasise her love of fire, and by the immaculately dressed...
| Author | Martin Booth |
| ISBN | 0312267533 |
The remarkably powerful and critically acclaimed novel that was chosen as A New York Times Notable Book of 1999 and shortlisted for The Booker Prize
The Industry of Souls is the story of Alexander Bayliss, a British citizen arrested for spying in the Soviet Union in the early 1950's. Eventually...
| Author | Caryl Phillips |
| ISBN | 0679757945 |
From the acclaimed author of Cambridge comes an ambitious, formally inventive, and intensely moving evocation of the scattered offspring of Africa. It begins in a year of failing crops and desperate foolishness, which forces a father to sell his three children into slavery. Employing a brilliant...
| 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 | Lisa Jackson |
| ISBN | 0373773730 |
Two classic stories in one volume!A Dangerous Precedent (1985)Kirsten McQueen's life had become one giant headline: Newswoman Sues Station for Age Discrimination! She had won the first round, but the network brought in its secret weapon for round two: brilliant attorney Dane Ferguson. And Dane...
| Author | Michelle Cameron |
| ISBN | 1439118221 |
Based on the life of the author’s thirteenth-century ancestor, Meir ben Baruch of Rothenberg, a renowed Jewish scholar of medieval Europe, this is the richly dramatic fictional story of Rabbi Meir’s wife, Shira, a devout but rebellious woman who preserves her religious traditions as she and...
| Author | Jane Gardam |
| ISBN | 0349114064 |
With the birth of her baby brother, eight-year-old Margaret Marsh is banished from the house every Wednesday afternoon to enjoy the idyllic English seaside—at peace between the world wars—with the family’s new, young, and bawdy maid. Largely ignored, the child has all the freedom she needs...
| Author | Pam Lintott |
| ISBN | 0715332082 |
Jelly Roll, Layer Cake and Charm Quilts provides seventeen beautiful projects that show you how to get the most from pre-cut fabric bundles. The projects range from smaller lap quilts to full-sized bed quilts and each is made from one jelly roll, layer cake or charm pack (or a combination), making the...
My Life as Dinosaur Dental Floss
| Author | Bill Myers |
| ISBN | 0849935377 |
The Good: All of the hallmarks of this series are here: Wally learning a very important lesson, plenty of comedic action, the story-within-a-story, and lots of insanity and fun. Though I'm almost thirty, and therefore well past the target audience, I had a blast with it, and it delivered a lesson many...
