Have a look at just some of our favourite new titles from Scottish Publishers

• Michael Russell, described by the Scotsman as a ‘talent to be followed closely’, debuts with a novel, Lie of the Land (Polygon) set in a post-catastrophe Scotland
• Dacre’s War (Polygon) by Rosemary Goring, the sequel to the well-received After Flodden, follows the fortunes of Adam Crozier a decade after the battle of Flodden, in a story of personal and political vengeance
• Scarlett Thomas’s The Seed Collectors (Canongate) is a contemporary tale of inheritance, enlightenment, life, death, desire and family trees, and is out now in hardback. Neil Gaiman’s a fan, calling it ‘a sharply observed contemporary novel of real people and real plants and real desire and real hurt, and somehow also one of the sharpest fantasies I’ve encountered’
• Prolific writer Chris Dolan has released his latest novel, Aliyyah, a modern Arabian tale set in an unnamed war-torn country. Publisher Vagabond Voices describes it as ‘a Romeo and Juliet story, but one for an age where scientific materialism is crossing bloody swords with religion’
• In Eva Makis’ prize-winning fourth novel, The Spice Box Letters (Sandstone Press), Katerina inherits a wooden spice box containing letters and diaries after her grandmother dies. As she pieces together her family history, she learns of the shattering effects of the Armenian tragedy of 1915
• In poetry, Tessa Ransford’s new collection, A Good Cause (Luath Press), offers a new selection of previously uncollected poems, the ‘good cause’ being ultimately the intrinsic good of poetry itself
• In children’s, Cathy Forde’s new book, The Blitz Next Door (Floris Books), is the latest addition to the Kelpies series and centres on the devastating events of the Clydebank Blitz
• In non-fiction, 100 Masterpieces from the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) by John Leighton, the director-general of the gallery, features such beauties as the sumptuous home-grown Lady Agnew of Lochnaw (a keen favourite of Phil Jupitus, apparently…) as well as pictures by Titian, Rembrandt and Vermeer, Picasso, Hockney and Warhol