Magnus

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	John Buchan
ISBN	1406501301

The 4th Hannay novel; this one isn't as relentlessly fast paced as its predecessors. There are several chapters with a domesticated post-war Hannay steadfastly refusing to be drawn into a new caper but 'methinks the lady doth protest too much' and he's soon drawn in. It bothers me a bit that Hannay and...

Author	Walter Scott
ISBN	0140430989

Perhaps the finest and certainly the most readable of Scott's Waverley novels, Old Mortality is a swift-moving historical romance that pits an anachronistically liberal hero against the forces of fanaticism in seventeenth-century Scotland - the period notorious as "the killing time." Its central...

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	John Prebble
ISBN	0712668209

This is the story of ordinary men and women involved in the Rebellion, who were described on the gaol registers and regimental rosters of the time as 'Common Men'. There is little in this book about Bonnie Prince Charlie and other principals of the last Jacobite Rising of 1745. Culloden recalls them by...

Author	Kathleen Jamie
ISBN	1555977022

Winner of the 2012 Costa Poetry Award, the latest collection by Kathleen Jamie, “the leading Scottish poet of her generation” (The Sunday Times)

See when it all unravels—the entire project
reduced to threads of moss fleeing a nor’wester;
d’you ever imagine chasing just...

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	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	Iain Crichton Smith
ISBN	0753812932

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...

Author

Lewis 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...

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	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	Ross Raisin
ISBN	0670917354

Ross Raisin wrote one of my favourite books of last year, and indeed of all time, God's Own Country, so I'd had his second novel Waterline pegged as a must-read since its release. Although I found it equally impossible to put down - reading the book from cover to cover in one sitting - Waterline is a very different...

Author	Dermot Bolger
ISBN	0007154119

"Home was not the place where you were born but the place you created for yourself, where you did not need to explain, where you finally became what you were."

An poignant discourse on the idea of "home," especially in a situation--so intense in Ireland, but resonant everywhere--that one might...

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	Monks of New Skete
ISBN	0316606944

I originally bought this book back in 1999, at the start of a difficult and challenging period of my life, and I've been "referring" to it ever since whenever times get tough. Don't let the fact that it was written by monks put you off; they know that everyone needs to do at least a little contemplation now...

Author

Victoria Whitworth

Victoria Whitworth began swimming in the cold waters of Orkney as a means of temporary escape from a failing marriage, a stifling religious environment and a series of health problems. Over four years, her encounters with the sea and all its weathers, the friendships she made, the wild creatures she...

Author

Philip Paris

The Italian Chapel is a story of forbidden love, lifelong friendships torn apart, despair and hope, set against the backdrop of the creation of a symbol that is known around the world.

Amidst strikes, conflicts and untold hardships, the Italian prisoners of war sent to a tiny Orkney island...

Author	Heather Rose
ISBN	0702235350

Winner of the Davitt Award – Crime Fiction Novel of the Year 2006

In November 1974 a young English nanny named Sandra Rivett was murdered in London's West End. Her employer, Lord Lucan, was named as her attacker. It was widely assumed he had mistaken her for his wife. Lord Lucan disappeared...

Author	Luke Sutherland
ISBN	0747569053

Drinking late one night in an East End club, a writer is approached by Pascal, the friend of a man named Desiree who claims he knows the writer from growing up in Orkney - and that he's dying and wants him to write his story. The writer ignores him. But a month later, a package arrives containing, among discs,...