Consider the Lilies

Author	Lewis Grassic Gibbon
ISBN	0862411793

Voted "Best Scottish Book of All Time" by "the public" in 2005

Look here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/sc...

The lines are gorgeous. When you listen to this you are there in the Scottish Highlands. When? At the beginning of the 20th century. Writing can be all about creating...

Author	A.L. Kennedy
ISBN	0224077864

Ms Kennedy should have a category of her own with different coloured stars, or the option to have the stars squared, 3D at the very least. She's a writer who expects a lot of her reader, and I like that. The opening chapter of this novel is a struggle, even the second time round it's not a smooth ride, no familiar...

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	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...

Author	Ron Butlin
ISBN	0862411262

Morris Magellan has a house in the suburbs, nice wife and kids. But Morris is also a chronic alcoholic, heading fast towards self-destruction. Morris is not hoping to meet Ms. Right and acquire the two kids that will straighten everything out. He already has all this and it hasn't kept him off the bottle....

Author	Anne Donovan
ISBN	1841954519

Anne Marie's dad, a Glaswegian painter and decorator, has always been game for a laugh. So when he first takes up meditation at the Buddhist Center, no one takes him seriously. But as Jimmy becomes more involved in a search for the spiritual, his beliefs start to come into conflict with the needs of his...

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	George Mackay Brown
ISBN	0862418143

Seamus Heaney once remarked that George Mackay Brown passed everything “through the eye of the needle of Orkney”, those remote islands north of Scotland where he was born and spent his life. This observation is certainly true of Magnus. The novel treats of aristocratic ambition, rousing...

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	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 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	Karin Altenberg
ISBN	1770890122

A portrait of a marriage, a meditation on faith, and a journey of conquest and self-discovery, Island of Wings is a passionate and atmospheric novel reminiscent of Wuthering Heights.

July, 1830. On the ten-hour sail west from the Hebrides to the islands of St. Kilda, everything lies ahead...

Author

Claire Davis

Winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award for Best First Novel and the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award for Best Novel

In Winter Range, the intimate details of ranching and small-town life are woven into the suspenseful story of three people struggling to survive, to belong,...

Author	John Burnside
ISBN	0385527640

Since George Lister’s chemical plant closed down, Innertown has been a shadow of its former self. In the woods that once teemed with life, strange sickly plants grow. Homes that were once happy are threatened by a mysterious illness.
Here, a young boy named Leonard and his friends exist in a state...

Author	Charles Maclean
ISBN	0862413885

A part of Britain but a world apart, St Kilda society existed almost completely isolated from the mainstream of civilization for more than 1000 years. Increased contact with the mainland during the 19th century brought about the downfall of what many once regarded as an ideal society. Missionaries...

Author	Janice Galloway
ISBN	0743238532

With "some of the greatest words ever written on thwarted love since Romeo and Juliet" (The Times, London), Clara reignites, from between the lines of history, the great love of Robert and Clara Schumann.

This impassioned novel gives voice to Clara Wieck Schumann, one of the most celebrated...

Author	María Amparo Ruiz de Burton
ISBN	1558850813

early hispanic historical romance, orig pub 1872
A major rediscovery-the first novel by a Mexican American Woman

Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton was the first Mexican American woman to write novels in English and the first nineteenth-century California writer to publish a novel in the aftermath...

Author	James Boswell
ISBN	1171923791

Travel journal first published in 1785. In 1773, Boswell enticed his famous English friend Samuel Johnson to accompany him on a tour through the highlands and western islands of Scotland. Johnson was then in his mid sixties. The two travellers set out from Edinburgh and skirted the eastern and northeastern...

Author

Maggie Craig

Edinburgh, 1822: In the glittering New Town, the Scottish capital is fast transforming itself into the Athens of the North. Catriona Dunbar lives in the dank underground vaults of the Old Town, where she and her young brother Andrew are slaves in all but name to their grasping aunt and pitiless, lecherous...

Author	George MacDonald
ISBN	0940652609

An abridged version of George MacDonald's book, "Annals of a Quiet Neighborhood" which was first published in 1865 as a serial in the "Sunday Magazine" in England.

A work of faith and hope, repentance and redemption, this novel, set in Marshmallows, a rural location in Victorian England,...