The Cone Gatherers
10 best books like The Cone Gatherers (Robin Jenkins): Sunset Song, Docherty (Coronet Books), The Lighthouse Stevensons: The extraordinary story of the building of the Scottish lighthouses by the ancestors of Robert Louis Stevenson, The Sound of My Voice, Electric Brae, Buddha Da, The Silver Darlings, Joseph Knight, No Mean City, Consider the Lilies
| Author | Lewis Grassic Gibbon |
| ISBN | 0862411793 |
Voted "Best Scottish Book of All Time" by "the public" in 2005
Look here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/sc...
The lines are gorgeous. When you listen to this you are there in the Scottish Highlands. When? At the beginning of the 20th century. Writing can be all about creating...
| 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 Douglas Brown |
| ISBN | 1419166867 |
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...
| 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 | Kevin MacNeil |
| ISBN | 0141021608 |
‘Fuck everyone from Holden Caulfield to Bridget Jones, fuck all the American and English phoney fictions that claim to speak for us; they don’t know the likes of us exist and they never did. We are who we are because we grew up the Stornoway way. We do not live in the back of beyond, we live in the very heart...
| Author | William Boyd |
| ISBN | 1400043204 |
A new collection of stories by the internationally acclaimed author of "Any Human Heart" ("the finest storyteller of his generation" -"Chicago Tribune").
In "Notebook No. 9," a film director's journal becomes an unintentional record of his obsessive love for his leading lady and the slow destruction...
| Author | John Buchan |
| ISBN | 0735105871 |
Set against the religious struggles and civil wars of seventeenth century Scotland, John Buchan's Witch Wood is a gripping atmospheric tale in the spirit of Stevenson and Neil Munro.
As a moderate presbyterian minister, young David Sempill disputes with the extremists of his faith, as all...
| Author | Janice Galloway |
| ISBN | 1564780821 |
From the beginning this novel's tension weaves warp and woof between hilarity and hell. Two women friends travel through France, encountering backroad-European misogynist crudities and the awkward experiences of being female, over thirty, with your teeth almost literally at your closest friend's...
| Author | Margaret Forster |
| ISBN | 0099507668 |
Don and Louise's eighteen-year-old daughter Miranda has died in a sailing accident. While Louise takes steps to move on with her life, Don cannot come to terms with the chain of events that led to her death. Instead, he is determined to bring someone to account. The surviving children handle the loss...
Stevie comes from a long line of people who have cut and run. Just like he has.
Only he’s not so sure he was right to go. He’s been to London, taught himself to get by, and now he’s working as a laborer not so far from his childhood home in Glasgow. But Stevie hasn’t told his family—what’s...
| Author | Clare Francis |
| ISBN | 0330439421 |
It is 1946, and the eve of the harshest winter for a hundred years. Servicemen are pouring home from the war to a land beset by food and job shortages. As anti-Polish refugee propaganda reaches its height, Wladyslaw Malinowski, a young veteran of Monte Cassino, attempts to start a new life on a withy farm...
| Author | Willy Russell |
| ISBN | 0435233017 |
Kitchen sink realism with appropriately-tuned bathos. A disaffected remedial class are taken away from school on a reward trip. Entertaining ensuing chaos is intertwined with the conflicting pedagogy of two supervising teachers. Stock characters like the new teachers and Head Teacher are fitted...
High up in the Conrad Flats that loom bleakly over Acton, two future stars of the literary scene – or so they assume – are hard at work, tapping out words of wit and brilliance between ill-paid jobs writing captions for the Cat Calendar 1985 and blurbs for trashy novels with titles like Brothel of the...
| Author | Wilkie Collins |
| ISBN | 1843910942 |
Exchanging vows of love with sailor Frank Aldersley the night before his departure, Clara Burnham is haunted by the memory of Richard Wardour, and his mistaken belief that they will one day marry. With her gift of 'Second Sight', Clara foresees terrible tragedy ahead and is racked by guilt. Allied to...
| Author | Liam McIlvanney |
| ISBN | 1487003757 |
Glasgow, 1969. In the grip of the worst winter for years, the city is brought to its knees by a killer whose name fills the streets with fear: The Quaker. He’s taken his next victim — the third woman from the same nightclub — and dumped her in the street like rubbish. The police are left chasing a ghost,...
