The Rector

Author	Walter Scott
ISBN	0140436561

This is a story of national change and personal tragedy. For Lucy Ashton and Edgar Ravenswood, acts of heroism are thwarted and love is doomed by social, political and historical division. This edition restores the action to the years of uncertainty and political flux before the Union of Scotland and...

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

Jane Porter

I learned about The Scottish Chiefs from the same person from whom I learned about many old-fashioned books: Louisa May Alcott, in her book A Garland for Girls. One of the stories contained therein is called Pansies, and in it some teenaged girls and Mrs Warburton, the elderly lady of the house the girls...

Author	Anthony Trollope
ISBN	0140434100

Written in 1863, near the beginning of his career, Rachel Ray is one of Anthony Trollope's sweetest, tightest, and most charming novels. The eponymous young lady is the daughter of one widow and sister of another. She falls for a handsome young man named Luke Rowan, who is the partner in a local brewery...

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	George Mackay Brown
ISBN	0862418143

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...

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	Arnold Bennett
ISBN	0140009973

Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) was a British writer. He went to work for his father but was unhappy working for his father and earning very little money. The theme of parental miserliness occurs in his works. At 21 he went to London to clerk for a solicitor. He then began working for a magazine called Women....

Author	Robert Louis Stevenson
ISBN	0976140713

Originally censored by its British publisher, The Beach at Falesá is a scathing critique of colonialism and economic imperialism that bravely takes on many of the 19th Century’ s strongest taboos: miscegenation, imperialism, and economic exploitation. It does so with a story that features a...

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	Harriet Martineau
ISBN	0141439394

When the Ibbotson sisters, Hester and Margaret, arrive at the village of Deerbrook to stay with their cousin Mr. Grey and his wife, speculation is rife that one of them might marry the local apothecary, Edward Hope. Although he is immediately attracted to Margaret, Hope is ultimately persuaded to marry...

Author	E.H. Young
ISBN	0385279752

Oddly, the word that springs to mind for this one is "charming." Ok. I really like E.H. Young; this is the fourth book of hers I've not only read but owned. All are set in the early 20th century, so there's always a cultural hump to get over, but this time I find the hump a little...different. The story concentrates...

Author	Susan Ferrier
ISBN	0192838938

Marriage (1818) is the shrewdly observant tale of a young woman's struggles with parental authority and courtship. Like her contemporaries, Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen, Susan Ferrier adopts an ideal of rational domesticity, illustrating the virtues of a reasonable heroine who learns to act...

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	John Buchan
ISBN	1842327844

When his friend Charles Pitt-Heron vanishes mysteriously, Sir Edward Leithen is at first only mildly concerned. But a series of strange events that follow Pitt-Heron’s disappearance convinces Leithen that he is dealing with a sinister secret society. Their codename is ‘The Power-House’....

Author	Mary Elizabeth Braddon
ISBN	0192833014

When The Doctor's Wife was first published in 1864, Mary Elizabeth Braddon was well known for her scandalous bestseller, Lady Audley's Secret. Adultery, death, and the spectacle of female recrimination and suffering are the elements that combine to make The Doctor's Wife a classic women's 'sensation'...

Author	Flann O'Brien
ISBN	1564781410

Subtitled An Exegesis of Squalor, The Hard Life is a sober farce from a master of Irish comic fiction. Set in Dublin at the turn of the century, the novel does involve squalor illness, alcoholism, unemployment, bodily functions, crime, illicit sex but also investigates such diverse topics as Church...

Author	Damian Barr
ISBN	1770893806

Long-listed for the Green Carnation Prize and The Sunday Times' selection for Memoir of the Year.


"This amazing book tells the story of an appalling childhood with truth and clarity unsmudged by self-pity. It grips from beginning to end." — Diana Athill, Costa Book Award–winning...

Author	Elizabeth von Arnim
ISBN	1853816779

Approaching the watershed of her fiftieth birthday, Fanny, having long ago divorced Mr. Skeffington and dismissed him from her thoughts, is surprised to find herself thinking of him. While attempting to understand this unwelcome invasion, she meets, through a series of coincidences and deliberate...