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Docherty (Coronet Books)

10 best books like Docherty (Coronet Books) (William McIlvanney): The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, Day, Theory of War, The Chymical Wedding, The Old Jest, Picture Palace, Injury Time, The Children of Dynmouth, The Bird of Night, Swing Hammer Swing!

The Sacred and Profane Love Machine
AuthorIris Murdoch
ISBN0140041117
Swinging between his wife and his mistress in the sacred and profane love machine and between the charms of morality and the excitements of sin, the psychotherapist, Blaise Gavender, sometimes wishes he could divide himself in two. Instead, he lets loose misery and confusion and—for the spectators...
Day
AuthorA.L. Kennedy
ISBN0224077864
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...
Theory of War
AuthorJoan Brady
"[A] vivid historical novel--part poignant biographical fiction, part raw frontier epic."
TIME
Taking flight from an extraordinary real-life family history, here is a riveting novel of how the past lives on, generation after generation. THEORY OF WAR is the richly imagined story of one...
The Chymical Wedding
AuthorLindsay Clarke
ISBN0449001180
I read this last December and enjoyed it immensely. It had been recommended to me twenty years ago, and finally I have been able to get to it. I could easily give it five stars, but then I would be only thinking of myself. Truth is, Clarke is a bit verbose for some tastes. And though I prefer more minimalist,...
The Old Jest
AuthorJennifer Johnston
ISBN0140106987
4★
This begins as a light-hearted, affectionate look at a young girl growing up in Ireland in 1920, after the end of WW1, but her childish, secret adventure turns serious and shows the dark divisions in Ireland.

Nancy was orphaned very young and has been raised in a friendly, loving household...
Picture Palace
AuthorPaul Theroux
ISBN0140050728
World-famous photographer Maude Coffin Pratt has pointed her lens at the beautiful, obscure, and obscene, and at the private places and public parts of the famous, from Gertrude Stein to Graham Greene. When the seventy-year-old Maude rummages through her archives in preparation for a triumphant...
Injury Time
AuthorBeryl Bainbridge
ISBN0349116113
"He almost took the wrong turning at the next roundabout. Muriel remained silent but pointed a contemptuous finger, at the last moment, in the correct direction"

Its that little clause at the last moment that captures the delight of this odd awkward story. The awkwardness is not of the writing,...
The Children of Dynmouth
AuthorWilliam Trevor
ISBN0140047182
CONTAINS SPOILERS

The main character comes across at first as a special ed kid, but as the story evolves we see that he is truly mentally disturbed. He’s an older teenager who is cast aside by his family. He has no father and his mother and older sister are good buddies, laughing, smoking, eating...
The Bird of Night
AuthorSusan Hill
ISBN0140040722
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...
Swing Hammer Swing!
AuthorJeff Torrington
ISBN0156001977
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...
Buddha Da
AuthorAnne Donovan
ISBN1841954519
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...
Our Fathers
AuthorAndrew O'Hagan
ISBN0771068352
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...
Magnus
AuthorGeorge Mackay Brown
ISBN0862418143

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...
The Silver Darlings
AuthorNeil M. Gunn
ISBN0571200788
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...
Joseph Knight
AuthorJames Robertson
ISBN0007150253
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...
Pfitz
AuthorAndrew Crumey
ISBN1909232807
"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...
No Mean City
AuthorA. McArthur
ISBN0552075833
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...
Consider the Lilies
AuthorIain Crichton Smith
ISBN0753812932
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...
A Scots Quair: Sunset Song, Cloud Howe, Grey Granite
AuthorLewis Grassic Gibbon
A Scots Quair is revolutionary—innovative in its form, deft and humorous in its use of the Scots language, courageous in its characterization and politics. Central to the trilogy is Chris Guthrie, one of the most remarkable female characters in modern literature. In Sunset Song, Gibbon's finest...
The Rector
AuthorMrs. Oliphant
Perhaps all the years of his life had not taught the Rector so much as did that half hour in an unknown poor bed-chamber, where, honest and humble, he stood aside, and, kneeling down, responded to his young brother's prayer. His young brother--young enough to have been his son--not half nor a quarter part...
Kieron Smith, Boy
AuthorJames Kelman
ISBN0151013489
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,...
Grace Notes
AuthorBernard MacLaverty
ISBN0393318419
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...
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