Electric Brae
10 best books like Electric Brae (Andrew Greig): The Lighthouse Stevensons: The extraordinary story of the building of the Scottish lighthouses by the ancestors of Robert Louis Stevenson, Paradise, Swing Hammer Swing!, The Sopranos, The Sound of My Voice, Buddha Da, The Silver Darlings, Joseph Knight, No Mean City, Whisky Galore
| 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 | A.L. Kennedy |
| ISBN | 1400079454 |
Hannah Luckraft sells cardboard boxes for a living. Her family is so frustrated by her behavior they can barely stand to keep in touch with her. Each day is fueled by the promise of annihilation, the promise of a reprieve, the paradise that can only be found in a bottle. When Hannah meets Robert, a kindred...
| 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 | Alan Warner |
| ISBN | 0156012014 |
As the choir from Our Lady of Perpetual Succor for Girls, in rural Scotland, is bussed into the big city to participate in the national singing finals, five of the teenage schoolgirls let loose for a night of pub crawling, shoplifting, and body piercing. And, since a nuclear submarine has just anchored...
| 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 | 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 | 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 | Compton Mackenzie |
| ISBN | 0099453541 |
It's 1943 and the war has brought rationing to the Hebridean islands of Great and Little Todday. When food is in short supply, it is bad enough, but when the whisky runs out, it looks like the end of the world.
Morale is at rock bottom. George Campbell needs a wee dram to give him the courage to stand...
| 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 | Robin Jenkins |
| ISBN | 1841955922 |
It’s easy to see why The Cone Gatherers is used as a set text for Higher English classes (in Scotland at least - I don’t know if this is the case elsewhere) - it’s a short but dense novel, heavy with symbolism, at times almost threatening to collapse under the weight of its symbolic and thematic density....
| Author | Tim Robinson |
| ISBN | 1844880656 |
In 1999, Tim Robinson established himself as one of Ireland's most brilliant nonfiction writers with the two-volume Stones of Aran, a tribute to the unspoiled wild of Ireland's Aran Islands. With Connemara, he creates an indelible portrait of a small corner of the world. From the unmarked graves of...
| Author | Gavin Francis |
| ISBN | 1846970784 |
The stark, vast beauty of the remote Arctic Europe landscape has been the focus of human exploration for thousands of years. In this striking blend of travel writing, history and mythology, Gavin Francis offers a unique portrait of the northern fringes of Europe. His journey begins in the Shetland...
| Author | Gordon M. Williams |
| ISBN | 0857681192 |
The original novel on which Sam Peckinpah's controversial movie Straw Dogs was based, and the inspiration behind a brand-new movie by Rod Lurie, starring Alexander Skarsgård and Kate Bosworth - due for release in September 2011.
American professor George Magruder, his wife Louise and...
| Author | James Kelman |
| ISBN | 0156031728 |
In the superbly crafted and critically acclaimed You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free, James Kelman has created an unforgettable character and a darkly comic portrait of a post-9/11 America.
Jeremiah Brown, a Scottish immigrant in his early thirties, has lived in the United States...
| Author | Nan Shepherd |
| ISBN | 0862411416 |
Nan Shepherd is best known for The Living Mountain, her uniquely personal book about The Cairngorms which is rightly regarded as a classic piece of nature writing. This 1928 novel was her first published work.
At its core is a rites of passage novel, told largely in Aberdeenshire dialect - this...
| Author | John Prebble |
| ISBN | 0140028374 |
In the terrible aftermath of the moorland battle of Culloden, the Highlanders suffered at the hands of their own clan chiefs. Following his magnificent reconstruction of Culloden, John Prebble recounts how the Highlanders were deserted and then betrayed into famine and poverty. While their chiefs...
Seven Tenths: The Sea and Its Thresholds
| Author | James Hamilton-Paterson |
| ISBN | 0571229387 |
"Travelling long distances by sea, on the other hand, gives us time. Travel is like death in that it requires mourning. The light melancholy of watching a coastline recede is a necessary observance. We join in with shipboard life just as soon as we wish, and not before. Otherwise we write in our cabin or...
| Author | Patrick Gale |
| ISBN | 0007313454 |
An exhilarating new collection of stories by the author of Richard & Judy-bestseller Notes from an Exhibition Patrick Gale, which combines wit and poignancy to illuminate experiences both common and uncommon. Love (& loathing) within families are dissected -- a father makes an unexpected...
| Author | Ernest Shackleton |
| ISBN | 0141025522 |
Although Shackleton's (1874-1922) epic expedition to reach the South Pole was a complete disaster, it was rescued from absurdity by his heroic, terrifying crossing of the Southern Ocean in a small boat to a whaling station on South Georgia. Through one of the greatest recorded feats of navigation...
| Author | Eric Newby |
| ISBN | 0864426216 |
As they travel around the sea at the center of Western history, Eric Newby and his wife Wanda visit not only the better-known Meditteranean sights and cities but also venture into places where Westerners are few: Albania under Hoxha, the holy Muslim city of Fez, and a country about to disappear in civil...
