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Swing Hammer Swing!

10 best books like Swing Hammer Swing! (Jeff Torrington): Day, Theory of War, Docherty (Coronet Books), The Bird of Night, Flying to Nowhere, Continent, The Comforts Of Madness, White City Blue, A Disaffection, Morvern Callar

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...
Docherty (Coronet Books)
AuthorWilliam McIlvanney
ISBN0340407573
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...
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...
Flying to Nowhere
AuthorJohn Fuller
ISBN0907540279
Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Flying to Nowhere is a modern Gothic novel with spiritual overtones that open out a set of classic novelistic quests. Set on a remote Welsh island during the Middle Ages, the tale is woven around two main characters&emdash;Vane, an emissary sent...
Continent
AuthorJim Crace
ISBN0141005440
To those who say there's nothing new to be written or read, Jim Crace has responded. For this provocative collection of short stories, Crace created a whole new continent. Unnamed and unspecified, the continent nevertheless resonates with characters, developments, contradictions and examinations...
The Comforts Of Madness
AuthorPaul Sayer
ISBN0340508043
(Winner of the 1988 Whitbread Award, The Comforts of Madness is narrated by a catatonic who never speaks. To the rest of the world he is an inert body and is subjected to a variety of experiments, but his own consciousness is vital and reflective. This novel draws attention to the fact that we can never really...
White City Blue
AuthorTim Lott
ISBN0140266496
Estate agent Frankie Blue is known on his home turf - White City, Shepherd's Bush - as "Frank theFib." He's a liar - but one who always tries to tell the truth. He has been friends with Diamond Tony, a hairdresser, Colin, a computer nerd, and Nodge,a cabbie, since schooldays. Now they are thirty, and trying...
A Disaffection
AuthorJames Kelman
ISBN0330307363
Patrick Doyle is a 29-year-old teacher in an ordinary school. Disaffected, frustrated and increasingly bitter at the system he is employed to maintain, Patrick begins his rebellion, fuelled by drink and his passionate, unrequited love for a fellow teacher. A Disaffection is the apparently straightforward...
Morvern Callar
AuthorAlan Warner
Morvern Callar, a low-paid employee in the local supermarket in a desolate and beautiful port town in the west of Scotland, wakes one morning in late December to find her strange boyfriend has committed suicide and is dead on the kitchen floor. Morvern's reaction is both intriguing and immoral. What...
Of Mutability
AuthorJo Shapcott
ISBN0571254705
Jo Shapcott's award-winning first three collections, gathered in Her Book: Poems 1988-1998, revealed her to be a writer of ingenuous, politically acute and provocative poetry, and rightly earned her a reputation as one of the most original and daring voices of her generation. In Of Mutability, Shapcott...
The Sound of My Voice
AuthorRon Butlin
ISBN0862411262
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....
Electric Brae
AuthorAndrew Greig
ISBN0571212859
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
The House with the Green Shutters
AuthorGeorge Douglas Brown
ISBN1419166867
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...
The Quarry Wood
AuthorNan Shepherd
ISBN0862411416
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...
Scotland: A New History
AuthorMichael Lynch
ISBN0712698930
From Bannockburn and Robert the Bruce to the union of the crowns and Mary, Queen of Scots; from the Reformation and John Knox, to the Enlightenment and the Highland Clearances, and right up to devolution, Scotland is the definitive history of a country that has experienced centuries of dramatic change.

Michael...
Under The Eye of the Clock
AuthorChristopher Nolan
ISBN0330303163
A remarkable work by several measures, Under the Eye of the Clock is the autobiography--told slyly through a third person alter-ego--of Christopher Nolan, struck at birth with brain damage and left paralyzed, spastic and mute. His first book, Dam-Burst of Dreams, written when he was a teen, was a collection...
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