Buddha Da
10 best books like Buddha Da (Anne Donovan): The Ventriloquist's Tale, Docherty (Coronet Books), Spinsters, The Lighthouse Stevensons: The extraordinary story of the building of the Scottish lighthouses by the ancestors of Robert Louis Stevenson, Swing Hammer Swing!, Morvern Callar, Electric Brae, Our Fathers, The Silver Darlings, Joseph Knight
| Author | Pauline Melville |
| ISBN | 1582340269 |
Pauline Melville conjures up vivid pictures both of savanna and forest and of city life in South America where love is often trumped by disaster. Unforgettable characters illuminate theme and plot: Sonny, the strange, beautiful and isolate son of Beatrice and Danny, the brother and sister who have...
| 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 | Pagan Kennedy |
| ISBN | 1852424052 |
It?s 1968, and Frannie and Doris, sisters and spinsters, are finally freed from family ties and constraints when their father dies. Taking off in their Plymouth Valiant they hit the road on a journey through the changing cultural landscape of America - civil rights marches, the assasinations of Martin...
| 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 | Jeff Torrington |
| ISBN | 0156001977 |
Oh the brogue! Now lads and lassies, I don’a mind a bit a brogue, but wha’s a bloke from the States supos’ ta mak’a dis?
“Maggie, god rest’re, never had tae hinge her back tae mend oor fire – bunker aye full tae the gunnels, so it was.” Or this: “Cauld enough tae make a polar bear...
Morvern Callar, a low-paid employee in the local supermarket in a desolate and beautiful port town in the west of Scotland, wakes one morning in late December to find her strange boyfriend has committed suicide and is dead on the kitchen floor. Morvern's reaction is both intriguing and immoral. What...
| 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 | 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 | James Robertson |
| ISBN | 0007150253 |
Exiled to Jamaica after the Battle of Culloden in 1746, Sir John Wedderburn made a fortune, alongside his three brothers, as a faux surgeon and sugar planter. In the 1770s, he returned to Scotland to marry and re-establish the family name. He brought with him Joseph Knight, a black slave and a token of...
| Author | Andrew Crumey |
| ISBN | 1909232807 |
"Pfitz manifests the same healthy disdain for realism that made his first novel, Music in a Foreign Language, such a pleasant surprise. His borrowings from Borges, Calvino and Pavic are here just as shameless. But at this rate Crumey may yet become a hero to fans of the postmodern Euro-novel who wonder...
| 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 | James Kelman |
| ISBN | 0151013489 |
I had cousins at sea. One was in the Cadets. I was wanting to join. My maw did not want me to but my da said I could if I wanted, it was a good life and ye saved yer money, except if ye were daft and done silly things. He said it to me. I would just have to grow up first.
James Kelman’s triumph in Kieron Smith,...
| Author | Bernard MacLaverty |
| ISBN | 0393318419 |
The award-winning Grace Notes is a compact and altogether masterful portrait of a woman composer and the complex interplay between her life and her art. With superb artistry and startling intimacy, it brings us into the life of Catherine McKenna — estranged daughter, vexed lover, new mother, and...
| 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 Buchan |
| ISBN | 0735105871 |
Set against the religious struggles and civil wars of seventeenth century Scotland, John Buchan's Witch Wood is a gripping atmospheric tale in the spirit of Stevenson and Neil Munro.
As a moderate presbyterian minister, young David Sempill disputes with the extremists of his faith, as all...
| Author | Roopa Farooki |
| ISBN | 0330463152 |
Roopa Farooki deftly explores the relationships and rivalries among siblings in this beautifully written novel, longlisted for the Orange Prize
When your little sister is anything but normal, is there a "normal" way to feel towards her?
The Murphy family is not like any other family...
Monkey King  tells the story of 28-year-old Sally Wang, a Chinese-American woman whose mental breakdown and sojourn in a hospital set her firmly on the path of memory. Her recovery takes place against a rich tapestry of culture and personality that unfolds before our eyes under the Monkey...
| Author | Maggie Gee |
| ISBN | 0863563805 |
“Outstanding . . . tender, sexy and alarming.”—Jim Crace
When Alfred White, patriarch of the White family, collapses at work, his wife, May, and their three disparate children find themselves confronting issues they would rather ignore. Maggie Gee skillfully weaves a narrative...
| Author | Éilís Ní Dhuibhne |
| ISBN | 0856406503 |
In a Donegal Gealtacht in 1972, four teenage girls from different sides of the border immerse themselves in Irish language and dance while also learning more about their own personal liberation. I finished this novel in a single sitting, I was so drawn in. At times I felt this narrative loomed right on...
| Author | Deirdre Madden |
| ISBN | 0571175511 |
Home
I grew up in Northern Ireland, in the quiet seaside town of Bangor, County Down. Although I had moved away before the Troubles started in 1968, I came back occasionally, and happened to be shopping in downtown Belfast during the bombings on "Bloody Friday" in July 1972. My wife and...
| Author | Manda Scott |
| ISBN | 0755325478 |
OK, Goodreads, that's like the worst blurb in the world. I really like Kellen’s first-person voice, although the habit she has of responding to dialogue with a thought before a new line for the actual response is confusing. I often had to go back and say, no she didn’t really say that. This is first...
