THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

Loosely chronological, Gordon Jarvie’s A Man Passing Through (comprising about half the poems of a consistently productive career) is his autobiography in poetry. It is a wry, witty and insightful collection, gathering together the various strands making up an ordinary life – family, writing, birdwatching, holidays and climbing, growing up, growing old, and everything between. Below is a short selection.

---

A Man Passing Through: Memoir with Poems, Selected and New
By Gordon Jarvie
Published by Greenwich Exchange

Herons Near Fife Ness

One, two, three, four:

the Cambo herons stand like sentries
all along Balcomie’s cold and rocky shore.

Five, six, seven, eight:

the fishing can’t be half bad
if they stand here morning, noon and late.

Grey and sleek and pointy
they never disappoint, eh?

Their cry? Raucous and coarse,
long throats a-croaking, rough and hoarse.

They loiter with intent
their fish-hunger to vent.

They’re languid yet so focused
on their next meal, like the locust.

The privilege, the thrill
to watch them stand so still.

Mankind, the moral midgets –
we are the frantic fidgets.

I stand and look upon a grey North Sea.
Bird-watching makes me peckish:
it’s nearly time for my tea.

---

Eagles or Buzzards?

for Sally and Frances

We ducked low branches, tripped on hidden roots,
the snow lay thick enough to call for boots.
But sun came slanting at us through the trees
while wind had dropped to silent puffs of breeze.

The scene was something out of Robert Frost
or Tolstoy: a glistering pinewood of the lost.
Subconsciously we listened for sleigh-bells
coming at us from across white Grampian hills.

That’s when we heard it – high up in the sky
an eerie mewling yelp to make blood thrill
and then the answering call from further up the hill.

Eagles or buzzards? Well, we couldn’t see
for trees, but then at last we found a bit of sky
and saw two soaring, gliding – too far away, too high.

---

In Hibernia Antiqua or Tir nan Og

after Hilaire Belloc

Do you remember, Miranda, when the hiker at the lonely B&B
was charged one and sixpence for his breakfast and high tea
as he walked the Connemara coastline in 1963?

Do you remember when a bottle of Guinness
(price: eleven old pence) was thrown in for a nightcap?
‘Drink it down, there’s a good chap, for a right good nap.’

When a chipped cupful of rawest firewater poteen
induced a heavy dream-filled sleep of eighteen
lost hours, snug in an ancient armchair by the fire?

When your host refused to speak in the English
in case you turned out to be a spy from Dublin Castle
come to check your farmer host was using his Irish –

for which they paid him a welcome Gaeltacht grant?
Or are these just tall stories from the olden times
à la Marco Polo, Mandeville et al? I wonder.

 

A unique collection of photographs, interviews and writing in both Gaelic and English, this book examines the impact of the First World War on one community.

---

 

Introduction to The Going Down of the Sun
by Katie Laing
Published by Acair Books

THERE are few events in life which would still be mourned 100 years later — but so deep and sore was the wound inflicted on Lewis by The Great War, that the collective heart is still heavy with loss.

As sure as the poppies still grow in Flanders field, the tears still flow at the memory of the hundreds of sons, husbands, fathers and brothers who never came home.

With this being the centenary of the outbreak of hostilities, 2014 has seen many acts of remembrance, but there can be none more moving than a newly-published book on the war, as it affected one island community.

The Going Down of the Sun is a beautiful hardback published jointly by Acair and Comunn Eachdraidh Nis (Ness Historical Society), which features a selection of first-hand accounts on the war by local survivors. These accounts were transcribed from interviews recorded on tape in the 1970s by the fledgeling historical society and preserved ever since.

A wealth of other historical information has been put into the book alongside these precious stories, including a new version of the Roll of Honour and an impressive timeline, which sets out the chronology of the war.

Touchingly, this timeline does not just detail the significant events as they played out, including all the victories and defeats in battle and the losses of various ships; it also includes the losses of every individual soldier and seaman.

On May 9 in 1915, for example, nine men aged 19 to 31 lost their lives. Most were killed in  action in France.

The book, written in both English and Gaelic, tells the story of the war experiences of the Ness district from Skigersta to Ballantrushal. But it could be telling the story of any island community.

It is alive with the stories of individuals and deserves an instant place in the canon of great literature on this terrible period of human history.

Read the full extract here:

 

Meet some of the city’s most lovable pub-goers. They’ll just have a tea, thanks.

---

 

Photos from Pub Dogs of Glasgow
By Reuben Paris and Graham Fulton
Published by Freight Books

Press comments about how illustrators are undervalued, made earlier this year, caused Floris Books’ Design & Production Manager Leah McDowell to sit up and take notice. In this article she investigates Floris’s approach to working on children’s picture books, and balancing the needs of both kinds of author.

---

“Writers will call an illustrated book ‘my book’, or newspapers will talk about ‘Julia Donaldson’s picture book’. To refer to writers and illustrators as ‘authors and illustrators’ is not comparing like for like. Both are ‘authors’ of the creative work—one author writes and the other author illustrates.”

This comment from illustrator Sarah McIntyre, published in The Bookseller in January, initially made me wonder whether she wasn’t blowing things out of proportion. As the main point of contact for illustrators at Floris Books, I’m usually aware of their particular sensitivities, and this felt like a hang-up too far.

But then, a couple of weeks later, The Bookseller published a separate article congratulating Michael Rosen on his one-thousandth week in Nielsen’s ranking of top-selling books with his book We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. It’s a brilliant book, a deserved classic. There was just one problem: the Bookseller completely failed to mention the book’s illustrator, Helen Oxenbury.

McIntyre was justifiably all over it, and that challenged me to think again about how Floris works with writers and illustrators, and whether there really is bias, unconscious or otherwise, at play. (The Bookseller issued an apology in the next issue.)

As the largest publisher of children’s books in Scotland, our writers and illustrators are unquestionably important to us, especially in our thriving range of Scottish picture books, the Picture Kelpies. Instinct told me that we consider them as equals, but I wanted stronger proof than that, so I went looking.

In autumn 2014 we published the first three books in our Traditional Scottish Tales range of picture books. All three involved a collaboration between a writer and an illustrator: Lari Don and Philip Longson (The Tale of Tam Linn); Theresa Breslin and Matthew Land (The Dragon Stoorworm); and Janis Mackay and Ruchi Mhasane (The Selkie Girl). In all three cases, the writers wrote the words first, and the illustrators were briefed once the story had been finalised. But in at least one case – The Tale of Tam Linn – the illustrator asked for a change to the text so it would work better with the illustration – and the writer agreed. Equally, the writer saw the rough illustrations and asked for some details to be changed – and the illustrator agreed. I was feeling better: this was definitely a collaborative process.

Furthermore, to launch the books, we organised an exhibition of the artwork at the Scottish Storytelling Centre, thereby putting the illustrators centre stage alongside the writers. More good evidence.

Finally, I thought about another writer-illustrator project we’ve been working on for the last year: An Illustrated Treasury of Scottish Mythical Creatures, the sequel to our bestselling An Illustrated Treasury of Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales. Both books are a collaboration between award-winning writer Theresa Breslin and hugely talented illustrator Kate Leiper. It takes Theresa about six months to write the stories, and it takes Kate about twelve months to do the illustrations. And while most of our communication with Theresa was by phone or email, every fortnight of those twelve months saw Kate in the Floris Books’ office, working with me on ideas, roughs and final colour work. There’s no question we give our illustrators as much nurture, support and encouragement as we can.

But then I also looked a bit further back in our publishing history. Years ago, when we first started publishing the Picture Kelpie range, the illustrator’s name was smaller on the cover. I guess we weren’t used to balancing the writer with another author at that point. Apologies to our earlier illustrators! We are learning all the time…

Now, though, we give our writers and illustrators equal billing on book covers, we regularly organise launches, school and festival events where writers and illustrators appear together (which works brilliantly for the audience, by the way), and all our marketing information for bookshops focuses on the illustrator as well as the writer, with a biography and photo for both, for example.

Although the examples I’ve given here are all a fairly traditional style of illustration (and by the way, we noticed that a quarter of books on the Greenaway longlist this year are traditional in style), of course we also love other styles too, especially the very modern and design-led work of Kate McLelland, illustrator of our most-loved picture book last year, There Was a Wee Lassie Who Swallowed a Midgie, and two new board books for wee hands, My First Scottish Colours, and My First Scottish Things That Go.

Finally, and to put my mind firmly at ease as to whether Floris values illustrators, we’ve just enjoyed the second year of our annual Kelpies Design & Illustration Prize, a prize that uncovers and showcases new Scottish illustrators and designers.

Since the gaffe was made by The Bookseller, Sarah McIntyre’s #PicturesMeanBusiness campaign has grown in strength, gaining high-profile supporters such as the 2015-17 UK Children’s Laureate Chris Riddell. The blunder highlighted starkly that all authors are not created equal – especially if they’re an illustrator. But I’m reassured that at Floris, we try our best to give our illustrators the credit and recognition they richly deserve.

Follow Leah and the Floris design team every Wednesday as they discuss design and illustration: #FlorisDesign

 

A moving, personal account of the author’s encounters with owls

---

 

 Extract from Barn Owl
By Jim Crumley
Published by Saraband Books

I was very young when I understood why a heart shape symbolises love. It was the shape of the fair face of barn owls – and I loved barn owls.

Prefab childhood in 1950s Dundee was essentially lived more out of doors than in. The prefabs were neatly buttoned to a west-facing hillside along the last street in town, and the farmland of Angus began across the road. Fields were as much for playing in as growing crops. From the top of the highest fields the land fell away northwards and rose again to the promise of the Sidlaw Hills. I considered winter geese and spring and summer skylarks to be as much my neighbours as my fellow prefab-dwellers ever were.

The entrance to the farmyard was no more than a quarter of a mile away from our prefab, but it was forbidden territory, and inhabited by what Lewis Grassic Gibbon would have called “coarse brutes”. Thinking about it now, they must have been simply people who did not know how to get on with the non-farming neighbours surrounding them on three sides. I hid when I saw them coming, though it does me no good to admit it now. One of them, only slightly older than myself, once opened a nasty cut in the side of my leg with an astonishingly well-aimed stone.

But the stackyard was a different proposition from the farmyard. I thought of it as no-man’s land. It belonged to the farm, of course, and farming things happened there, but it was frontier land that lay between the farmyard and the street from which it was only flimsily fenced off. And mine was the kind of childhood that did not pay much heed to flimsy fences.

Haystacks were shifting, unchancy creatures, especially at night. They seemed to appear overnight then stood around for weeks, or months, and grew dishevelled in gales and downpours. Voles, mice and rats and other furry beasts I couldn’t name sped along the curved alleyways between stacks, and barn owls loved voles, mice and rats as much as I loved barn owls, albeit a different kind of love.

So my first barn owls coursed silently through my most impressionable years, low-flying, head-down hunters that tilted and swerved on one wingtip or the other as the light faded over the Tay estuary far below and the lights of villages on its Fife shore glittered in small clusters. The darker the night, the brighter the face, the breast and the underwings of the moping, mopping-up owl, and the more predatory its grip on my young imagination.

Read the full extract below

 

Katy is an impressionable teenager obsessed with Misty magazine and its beauty tips. With her once-glamorous mother, Corinne, spiralling into self-destruction, she turns to Misty for advice, with disastrous but often hilarious consequences. Only Katy’s teacher, Jane, has the insight to put her pupil back on track, but she has a story of her own to tell. Can these three very different women each find their own voice in a society obsessed with perfection?

---

 

From Beauty Tips for Girls
By Margaret Montgomery
Published by Cargo Publishing

3B ENTERED the classroom at the end of the corridor on the third floor of Craigie Academy like a pack of steaming animals. The buffaloes entered first, boys who scraped chairs away from desks as they fought to reach the seats furthest away from the teacher. They bumped each other deliberately, kicked each other on the shins. Their faces shone with a mixture of exhilaration and aggression. Eyes alight, hair wet, spots glowing, they went for the kill and when they had claimed their prize, sat on it as if it was nothing to them. They didn’t want to be here anyway. English was for girls and Miss Ellingham had the contemptible scent of weakness about her.

Next came the hyenas, giggling girls with their arms folded across their recently grown bosoms, hair hanging round their faces in untidy ropes you would never have guessed they had spent hours arranging. They kept their heads down, feigned awareness of no-one except themselves. But the strong scent of perfumes, soaps, deodorants and hair preparations revealed to the watchful Miss Ellingham who stood like a gamekeeper at the edge of the savannah that these were animals on heat, dizzy from the proximity of testosterone, who could tell by instinct alone which boys were sitting where and what they were wearing.

After the hyenas came the gazelles, graceful and long limbed, quivering with nervous beauty. Of these, Katy Clemmy was the last to cross the room, dropping into a seat in front of Miss Ellingham’s desk with a flustered quickness which betrayed her self consciousness. Wide-eyed and watchful, she sat forwards and kept her blazer on, as if anticipating a need to run from danger at any moment.

The gazelles were closely followed by those who had somehow missed the point of evolution. Girls like Madeleine McCutcheon who wore thick glasses, and shoes she allowed a comparatively elderly mother to buy for her from Damart. Boys like Kevin McCarra who excelled at everything but could only talk to himself. These pupils, like the gazelles, deliberately took seats close to the teacher’s desk and pulled out their jotters as if they were hymn books. Then, eyes lowered, they meditated above them, looking as if they expected their teacher to say, “Let us pray.”

“Ink exercises down to the front,” was what, in fact, she did say, and there was the rumble of conversation and another scraping of chairs on the black and white linoleum tiles as the buffaloes slapped their ink exercise jotters down on their desks.

“Pass them down then,” Miss Ellingham said and the buffaloes took the opportunity to slap the hyenas on their backs and necks with the yellow exercise books. Soon the hyenas were giggling and rolling their eyes, attempting to hide their excitement beneath feigned indifference.

Miss Ellingham was by now rolling her eyes too, for among the things she hated most about a job she hated was the sheer juvenility of the pupils. Outside, she observed, it was fine spring day in which cauliflower clouds were coursing across a bright blue sky. The trees that ran round the perimeter of the nearby park looked less black and spidery than they had done a week ago when she had last taken 3B for literature. Craigie, the Godforsaken cultural backwater she had reluctantly taken a job in seven years ago, telling herself it was only for a year (something ‘stable’ that would utilise her ‘talents’, as her mother put it) looked almost picture-postcard pretty.

But time out for reflection was time she could ill afford. Turning her eyes back to the classroom she saw that the jotters had now made their way down to the wounded and gormless.

Madeleine McCutcheon had piled the jotters neatly on top of each other so that they formed an erect skyscraper but somehow a paper airplane had lodged itself in her bushy brown hair without her realising it and the sight of its nose emerging from just above her left ear was causing mirth in the desks behind her. Elise MacDonald who sat behind Kevin McCarra was making a show of dropping the jotters she had collected onto his desk one by one. She threw each from a slightly different angle so that Kevin, whose life would have been much easier if he had simply turned round and collected the jotters as a job lot, jumped nervously at the arrival of every one. Next to him, Katy Clemmy was faring little better. Her elfin face fixed on the window, blue eyes wide with panic, she was pretending not to notice as Billy Neill flicked rolled up balls of paper at her with his ruler from five desks back. As Miss Ellingham could have predicted, the ink exercise jotters were meanwhile lying on her desk in such a higgledy-piggledy fashion that they were starting to fall onto the floor.

“Katy…”

“Clemmy’s got big tits,” said a voice that sounded suspiciously like Billy Neill’s. Miss Ellingham felt a sudden burst of pity for the girl just a foot away from her whose delicate face had flushed red and who appeared to be trying hard to fight back tears.

“I’ll just pick those up, will I?” she said, bending down to scoop up the jotters lying at the girl’s feet. But as she gathered them, her fingers running across a film of dirt and dust the cleaners had failed to observe, sympathy turned to confusion. Katy Clemmy, recovered from the embarrassment of Billy Neill’s comment, was watching her, along with most of her classmates. Watching her and, in Billy’s case at least, smirking. “Check that bum.” “Lost a contact, miss?” Miss Ellingham rose to her feet and stared out the window at the web of trees in the distance. All of a sudden she wanted to cry too. But I am too old to cry like Katy Clemmy, she thought, which made her want to cry all the more.

Read the full extract here:

The Folk Tales of Scotland by Norah & William Montgomerie

There are many beautiful versions of Scottish folk tales to choose from, but this is my favourite for the variety of the stories.

 

Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith

A modern-day interpretation of a Greek myth, this gender-swap novel is truly timeless.

 

The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks

Iain Banks’s debut is violent, disturbing, and unforgettable. To say I enjoyed it isn’t quite right – I was utterly changed by reading it.

 

Gossip From the Forest by Sara Maitland

It might seem that modern forests and old fairytales don’t have much overlap, but Sara Maitland intertwines them in such a wonderful way. My favourite part is Maitland’s own feminist fairytale retellings.

 

Night Geometry And The Garscadden Trains by A.L. Kennedy

It’s impossible to choose a bad A.L. Kennedy book, but my favourite is her first. I read it at university and was completely floored by Kennedy’s use of language and pin-sharp description of emotional tangles.

 

Garnethill by Denise Mina

I’d almost given up on crime novels before I discovered the Garnethill trilogy. I’m now an avid Mina fangirl, and would happily read her shopping list.

 

True North: Travels in Arctic Europe by Gavin Francis

I’m a sucker for anything to do with the Arctic, and this is one of the most vivid and gorgeously-written books on the subject.

 

Gillespie and I by Jane Harris

This novel perfectly embodies the phrase ‘literary thriller’: it’s certainly thrilling, but the prose is beautiful, the history is detailed, and it’s clear that Jane Harris knows exactly what she’s doing. I read all 500 pages in a couple of days – immensely enjoyable.

 

Night Waking by Sarah Moss

It’s no surprise that Sarah Moss lectures in the use of place in story, because the isolated Scottish island is so vivid it acts as a character. I don’t think I’d actually want to meet any of these characters, but I loved spending time with them in the novel.

 

Fishnet by Kirstin Innes

Kirstin Innes is one of the brightest stars of the young Scottish scene, and for her debut she explores the sex industry with sensitivity and sensuality.

 

The People of the Sea by David Thomson

The definitive book on the selkie, one of Scotland’s saddest, loveliest and most enduring myths.

 

---

Kirsty‘s latest book The Gracekeepers is out now, published by Vintage.

The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark

An antidote to pseudo-clever books about books and very funny.

 

Scottish Ballads edited by Emily Lyle

Full of stories from a before-time that resonates right through Scottish literature.

 

Venus as a Boy by Luke Sutherland

Startling and brutal and beautiful, writing from Scottish island remembered by a black adopted child.

 

The Deadman’s Pedal by Alan Warner

Mr Warner writing like a dream about the world of men and trains – coming of age.

 

Pure Dead Magic by Debi Gliori

Wonderfully inventive and immediately recognisable and good to read aloud.

 

Lanark by Alasdair Gray

Because it’s Lanark.

 

The Burn by James Kelman

Because there aren’t enough short stories and I think it’s what Mr K does very best.

 

A Case of Knives by Candia McWilliam

To the memory of my first hearing of a remarkable voice.

 

The Life of Robert Burns by Catherine Carswell

Was banned on first appearing for being a little too sexually honest and a clearer look at Burns than any misguided hagiography.

 

Any book by Kathleen Jamie

Because Kathleen Jamie is the Queen of Sheba.

 

---

Janice‘s latest book Jellyfish is out now published by Freight Books.