The Fanatic
10 best books like The Fanatic (James Robertson): The Restraint of Beasts, The Matrix, The Lighthouse Stevensons: The extraordinary story of the building of the Scottish lighthouses by the ancestors of Robert Louis Stevenson, The Sopranos, Grace Notes, The House with the Green Shutters, The Stornoway Way, The Hills is Lonely, Goblin, You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free
| Author | Magnus Mills |
| ISBN | 0684865114 |
Once upon a time in Scotland, there were three men who built high-tension fences, the kind that keep animals in and humans out—or maybe the other way around. Magnus Mills gives us a wiry novel of tensile strength that proves him a writer of ferocious talent. Eerie, resonant, spare yet rich in tones both...
I just finish this book today. I started reading then stopped because I think he drag a bit in the middle. Nothing was happening.
The first person perspective was a point in it's favor. I think if this book had been written in the third person the eerie aura that follow the narrator would not be as...
| 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | Lillian Beckwith |
| ISBN | 1888173424 |
The Hills is Lonely tells a simple tale: needing to recuperate from an illness, the author finds a suitable retreat on the Hebridean island of Bruach, whose inhabitants, routines, and rituals are as eccentric and entertaining as any reader could wish. Beckwith's narrative describing island life...
Ian McEwan’s Atonement meets Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth in this extraordinary debut.
A novel set between the past and present with magical realist elements. Goblin is an outcast girl growing up in London during World War 2. After witnessing a shocking event she increasingly...
| 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 | Stephanie Calman |
| ISBN | 0330438751 |
Funny, acutely observed, frighteningly honest and drawing on her own and hundreds of other mum's real experiences, Stephanie Calman serves up the perfect antidote to all those books that tell you that your children must be perfect, and to all those Stepford mums and kids out there who look as if they...
| Author | Tom Steel |
| ISBN | 0006373402 |
On 29 August 1930 the remaining 36 inhabitants of this bleak but spectacular island off Scotland's western coast took ship for the mainland. A community that had survived alone for centuries finally succumbed to the ravages that resulted from mainland contact. What their lives had been like century...
| Author | Lewis Grassic Gibbon |
| ISBN | 1406572187 |
Lewis Grassic Gibbon was the pseudonym of James Leslie Mitchell (1901-1935), a Scottish writer. Mitchell started working as a journalist for the Aberdeen Journal and the Scottish Farmer at age 16. In 1919 he joined the Royal Army Service Corps and served in Persia, India and Egypt before enlisting...
| Author | Elizabeth Goudge |
| ISBN | 1893766063 |
Judy Cameron is ever so bored with modern London and her glamorous, perfect life. Stifled, her imagination seizes on a picture she sees in a shop window, a picture of the Scottish wilds. It inspires her.
Strong-willed, she prevails on her parents and fiance to change their summer plans and head...
| Author | Robert Louis Stevenson |
| ISBN | 0140435603 |
Io non chiedo ricchezze, né speranze, né amore, né un amico che mi comprenda; tutto quello che chiedo è il cielo sopra di me e una strada ai miei piedi.
Ci ho messo una settimana a leggere poco più di 200 pagine. Tanto tempo: non volevo arrivare alla fine, o meglio, alla non-fine. Stevenson...
Folklore of the Scottish Highlands
| Author | Anne Ross |
| ISBN | 0752419048 |
The folklore of the Scottish Highlands is unique and very much alive. Anne Ross is a Gaelic-speaking scholar and archaeologist who has lived and worked in crofting communities, which has enabled her to collect information firsthand and assess the veracity of material already published. In this substantially...
My Heart's in the Lowlands: Ten Days in Bonny Scotland
| Author | Liz Curtis Higgs |
| ISBN | 1400072972 |
"Let's go, shall we? Just the two of us?"
"I consider Galloway the country's best kept secret: a place where time holds its breath, where ancient ruins dot the countryside in moss-covered splendor, where the natives are friendly and tourists are few, only because they don't know what they're...
| Author | Madeleine Bunting |
| ISBN | 1847085172 |
Few landscapes are as iconic as the islands off the north-western Scottish coast. On the outer edge of the British Isles and facing the Atlantic Ocean, the Hebrides form part of Europe's boundary. Because of their unique position in the Atlantic archipelago, they have been at the centre of a network...
| Author | Tony Black |
| ISBN | 1848090226 |
Gus Dury once had a high-flying career as a journalist and a wife he adored. But now he is living on the edge, a drink away from Edinburgh's down-and-outs, drifting from bar to bar, trying not to sign divorce papers. But the road takes an unexpected turn when a friend asks him to investigate the brutal torture...
| Author | Toby Litt |
| ISBN | 0099268396 |
Nuori nainen tutustuu englantilaisen käpykylän kahteen tekotaiteelliseen runopoikaan, jotka ovat lukeneet Jack Kerouacia vähän turhan intensiivisesti ja joiden maailma on pysähtynyt vuoteen 1966, hetkeen jolloin Bob Dylan mukamas kuoli moottoripyöräonnettomuudessa.
Toby...
An exciting new novel, by the author of The Story of My Disappearance and Archangel.
At the turn of World War II, David Halifax is a young American painter who receives a scholarship to come to Paris and work under the tutelage of the mysterious and brilliant Russian painter, Alexander Pankratov....
| Author | Adam Mars-Jones |
| ISBN | 0571217036 |
Meet John Cromer, one of the most unusual heroes in modern fiction. If the minority is always right then John is practically infallible. Growing up disabled and gay in the 1950s, circumstances force John from an early age to develop an intense and vivid internal world. As his character develops, this...
| Author | Kerstin Ekman |
| ISBN | 0099751615 |
A very early Nordic Noir novel. (See my blurb on Nordic Noir at the end of this review.) It’s translated from the Swedish and set in northern Sweden, in Lapland, but the folks in the story are speaking Finnish or their native Sami language.
It’s very much an environmental novel....
