No Mean City
10 best books like No Mean City (A. McArthur): Docherty (Coronet Books), The Sea Road, Murder of a Lady, The Lighthouse Stevensons: The extraordinary story of the building of the Scottish lighthouses by the ancestors of Robert Louis Stevenson, Paradise, Swing Hammer Swing!, Young Adam, The Sound of My Voice, Electric Brae, Buddha Da
| 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 | Margaret Elphinstone |
| ISBN | 1841951765 |
A haunting, compelling historical novel, The Sea Road is a daring retelling of the 11th-century Viking exploration of the North Atlantic from the viewpoint of one extraordinary woman. Gudrid lives at the remote edge of the known world, in a starkly beautiful landscape where the sea is the only connection...
| Author | Anthony Wynne |
| ISBN | 0712356231 |
Duchlan Castle is a gloomy, forbidding place in the Scottish Highlands. Late one night the body of Mary Gregor, sister of the laird of Duchlan, is found in the castle. She has been stabbed to death in her bedroom - but the room is locked from within and the windows are barred. The only tiny clue to the culprit...
| 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 | Alexander Trocchi |
| ISBN | 0802139779 |
Joe is a drifter who works as a hired hand on a barge traveling the Clyde River between Glasgow and Edinburgh. As the story opens, he finds the corpse of a young woman drifting downstream. Was it an accident? Suicide? Murder? As the police investigate and arrest a suspect, it becomes apparent that Joe knew...
| 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | Max Beerbohm |
| ISBN | 0940322544 |
In Seven Men the brilliant English caricaturist and critic Max Beerbohm turns his comic searchlight upon the fantastic fin-de-siècle world of the 1890s—the age of Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, and the young Yeats, as well of Beerbohm's own first success. In a series of luminous sketches, Beerbohm...
| Author | Leslie Charteris |
| ISBN | 0786702281 |
The Saint, returning to England via France after his round against Prince Rudolf and the entire German police force, has counteracted Claud Eustace Teal’s ambition to arrest him immediately by a method that (let it be admitted) is not really cricket, and which draws upon him the disapproval of his...
| Author | Tibor Fischer |
| ISBN | 0312278527 |
In his first book of short stories, Tibor Fischer examines the lives of loners and failures. With both wit and sobriety, he depicts the trials of a Web site salesman who cannot connect with others, an artist whose career is going nowhere, a failed cowboy, a has-been solicitor, and a stand-up comedienne...
The Secret History of Costaguana
| Author | Juan Gabriel Vásquez |
| ISBN | 1594488037 |
A bold historical novel from "one of the most original new voices of Latin American literature" (Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature).
In the early twentieth century, a struggling Joseph Conrad wrote his great novel Nostromo, about a South American republic he named...
| 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 | 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...
| Author | Compton Mackenzie |
| ISBN | 0140292985 |
The ancient clan spirit is not yet dead in the Scottish highlands, with Donald MacDonald of Ben Nevis ruling the roost at wild, craggy Glenbogle Castle. Woe betide those who trespass on this Chieftain's kingdom...
So when a hapless bunch of Sassenach hikers invades the glens, camping on Ben...
| Author | Christy Brown |
| ISBN | 0436070901 |
This was a dollar shelf find while traveling around, my other choice was book on the psychology of serial killers. Fortunately, my lack of palette for gory true crime won out over my current obsession with neuroscience and I got this book instead. This isn't so much of a novel as it seems a impressionistic...
PRIZZI'S HONOR is no ordinary story of boy-meets-girl. Charley Partanna is a faithful lieutenant for the Prizzis, New York's most powerful Mafia family. The object of his affections is Irene Walker, a Los Angeles-based tax consultant. But it's her freelancing that pays--she's a hit woman for the...
| Author | Irvine Welsh |
| ISBN | 0224050036 |
Ended up thinking in Scottish for a week afterwards, with the way the books were written. I think that in itself was an interesting method of really allowing a reader to get into the head of the protagonist (or antagonist, in the case of Maribou). Trainspotting was done brilliantly by the film, and I feel...
