THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

At this time of year, it’s great to look at good people and good deeds. David Robinson reads a friend’s memoir with a sense of humbling awe.

 

From Scotland with Love
By Fred Bridgland
Published by KDP

 

The road down Mount Igman to Sarajevo wasn’t much of a road at all – more of a forest track, really – and when the city was under siege by the Serbs, for the last one and a half miles it effectively meant driving through a battlefield. All the way down by the side of the road were wrecks of burnt-out  lorries, buses and military vehicles that never made it, hit by Serbian artillery and mortar fire.

On 28 April 1995, Denis Rutovitz, a 61-year-old mathematician and geneticist from Edinburgh, was in the passenger seat of a 13-tonne Bedford truck making that very journey. He knew the route over Mount Igman well enough to know why everyone called it the most dangerous road in Europe, how you could almost get mesmerised by the tracer fire coming towards you as you sped downhill, how you could never really trust the military police’s assessment whether or not that last section of the mountain – single track, steep, completely exposed – might be safe. Already that day, they’d seen one truck on it set ablaze by Serb artillery from across the valley.

Everyone on the mission called Denis’s truck Big Ted. It led the other nine in the convoy downhill towards the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, which had been under siege by Serbian forces for three years – five months longer than the siege of Leningrad in the Second World War and the longest siege of a capital in the twentieth century.

The last lorry in the convoy was nicknamed Big Yin, driven by a volunteer mechanic called Andy Sutherland. He was already speeding down the Mount Igman track in pursuit of the other eight when a mortar shell hit one of the lorry’s wheels. Sutherland lost control and the Big Yin slithered upside down, with him still in the cab, down the flank of the mountain and into a ravine, where it split open.

It was only later, when he got down the mountain, and caught up with Big Ted, that he saw the passenger window that had been shattered by the heavy machine gun bullet on its way to Denis Rutovitz’s heart.

*

 

Because I can, I’ll stop that bullet just before it hits, and leave it where I first heard about Denis Rutovitz – on page 50 of Fred Bridgland’s excellent book From Scotland With Love, a history of Edinburgh Direct Aid, which Rutovitz founded in 1992, and which since then has been doing its bit to relieve pain and suffering not just in Bosnia but Kenya, Gaza and the West Bank, Lebanon, Kashmir, Sri Lanka and Ukraine.

Full disclosure: Fred is a friend, such a good friend in fact that I’m almost tempted to prove my objectivity by writing a stinker of a review.  But I can’t, because how could anybody not be moved by admiration, wonder and yes, a small amount of guilt, at the stories it contains. Guilt first: Not only have I not written them a cheque but I haven’t dropped off any school supplies, toiletries, waterproof clothing and fleeces, good shoes and boots (apparently they’re OK right now for bedding, blankets, sleeping bags and tents) at their warehouse on 16a West Harbour Road, Edinburgh, EH5 1PN (11am-3pm Wednesdays and Sundays). In fairness, I can’t beat myself up about this because until I read Fred’s book I didn’t know very much about EDA.

But the rather larger feeling of guilt is that From Scotland With Love is full of stories of people who act with levels of courage and moral responsibility on a scale I find absolutely humbling.

Suppose, for example, my wife and I had planned a walking holiday in Crete and a war broke out across the Adriatic in the Balkans. Chances are, we would go on that holiday. What we wouldn’t do is what Rutovitz and his wife Jeanne did in 1992: cancel the holiday and instead drive across Europe and deliver thousands of pounds worth of non-perishable food, toiletries, medicines and dressings to Croatia.

Or again, suppose I had read about the Rutovitzs’ mission, would I then, like 52-year-old Christine Witcutt, a Wishaw primary school teacher just beginning to enjoy retirement, want to join them on their convoy to Sarajevo, already a city under an 11-month siege in March 1993? And if, when Christine was killed by a bullet in Sniper’s Alley, would I be able to bring myself to say what her husband Alan did to Scottish reporters when asked, on returning from Bosnia, what he would say to the people who shot his wife, ‘I’m trying to forgive them’? I don’t think I would have such grace.

(Christine Witcutt lives on in the form of a day care centre for children with special needs in Sarajevo, which needs £25,000 a year to run its home visiting service. Donations can be sent to www.christinewitcuttfund.org.)

There are so many unsung heroes in Fred’s book that I almost lose count. The only one I’d heard of is John Home Robertson, MP or MSP for East Lothian for nearly three decades, but even then I knew nothing of his work for EDA building a brick kitchen and community centre near a Kenyan bush orphanage with his son, providing an earthquake-hit Himalayan village with a permanent clinic and temporary shelter in a bitterly cold winter and assessing flood damage by horseback after the Pakistan floods of 2011. What a tremendous human being – and him a politician too!

And what about Maggie Tookey? A retired teacher who cycled around the world (!) and then became EDA’s international field operations director. She worked alongside Home Robertson in all of those places and more – like for example, Kosovo, which some observers thought an even more vicious civil war than Bosnia’s. And then Lebanon, where, in 2014, in a border town flooded with refugees from Assad’s Syria, she was the only western aid worker in a camp riddled with Isis supporters. In setting up classes for electricians, plumbers, computer literacy and first aid at a time when she was an obvious target, living alone with no security apart from a rusty door, her courage was and is (she’s in Ukraine now) off the scale.

All of these stories are told in Fred’s book after Page 50, so I really ought to go back to finish telling the story of Denis Rutovitz.

The 12.7mm heavy machine-gun bullet that smashed Big Ted’s passenger window did indeed hit him in the heart area. These bullets are bigger than you’d think – over four inches long – and this one went straight through the flak jacket and through his chest wall. It just missed his lung but bruised it, causing internal haemorrhaging.

And yet he lived. He still lives, aged 95, honoured with an MBE for his work (his wife Jeanne, Professor Emeritus of Neuropathology at Edinburgh University technically outranks him with a CBE). Edinburgh Direct Aid – now renamed Edinburgh Direct Aid International – lives on too. Rutovitz  wants to step down from leading the organisation, but for it to remain what it always has been – nimble, volunteer-run (its website is quite basic: always a good sign money isn’t being needlessly diverted), ideally with more young people involved. ‘There is a dearth of young people turning up to do work in the field,’ he says, ‘which is the purpose that justifies our existence.’ If young people’s internationalism and idealism is indeed on the wane, we should all be worried.

When in Ukraine, Edinburgh Direct Aid likes to work with a partner organisation whose name translates as Small Wins. That, it seems to me, is exactly what EDA offers. In the scheme of things – the 100,000 killed, 2.2 million displaced, the 12,000-20,000 women raped in the Bosnian war, for example – you can argue that these wins are so small that they don’t add up to very much at all to put on the other side of the ledger.

Yet in that war former BBC journalist Martin Bell (who writes the foreword to Fred’s book) singled EDA out for their effectiveness, and I’m sure that hasn’t changed since. Those trucks being loaded up at West Harbour Road, those EDA containers sent from Grangemouth, are launched into the world by a charity which doesn’t pay its CEO a five-figure salary or indeed anything at all: no-one is paid except staff in destination countries. It doesn’t use expensive advertising or rely on others to deliver aid ‘and a hand of friendship, in person, always’.

So while it doesn’t counterbalance the horrors of war, at least EDA’s small wins add up to something. Whether it’s  famine or a flood, invasion or civil war – or doing the rebuilding work after all of them –  it’s always something.

 

From Scotland With Love by Fred Bridgland is published by KDP, price £15 (plus £3 postage) and can be ordered from https://www.peoplesfundraising.com/shop/from-scotland-with-love.

It’s time once more to highlight new Scots and Gaelic book releases for 2025. If you missed the Spring 2025 round up, you can read that here. Here are some excellent books from the second half of the year.

 

Poyums Annaw
By Len Pennie

The follow-up collection to her bestselling Poyums, this collection is just as fiery, honest and expressive as her debut. With poems on social justice, feminism, relationships and perseverance, it’s perfect reading for those looking for inspiration and ideas on living today.

 

 

 

Square Baw
By Hamish MacDonald

A beautiful, nostalgic and robust collection of poetry on football and what it means for family, community and history. Hamish MacDonald gives a starring role in this collection to his grandfather who played at junior and amateur level and fought in the First World War.

 

 

 

Am Measg Luaithrean, Beò
By Robbie MacLeòid

Robbie MacLeòid’s debut pamphlet is about transgression and rebellion in many forms. The bilingual poems are provocative and exciting, and break form and language to interrogate Scotland, sensuality, and sin.

 

 

 

 

Goonie
By Michael Mullen

Goonie is the raw and joyful debut collection from award-winning Scottish poet and spoken word artist Michael Mullen. It combines the oral tradition of Scots with whip-sharp Glaswegian humour to bring alive in language and form the full spectrum of human connection, from family parties to city living, to a chat with a hairdresser, to abiding friendship and queer awakenings.

 

 

Jist Sayin’
By Lilian Ross

A lovely collection of short stories, poems, and prose based on the author’s own memories and observations of the folk and culture of Aberdeenshire, marrying autobiography and imagination illuminated with humour and intimate nostalgia.

 

 

 

 

Sradagan san Iarmailt
Edited by Marcas Mac an Tuairneir

This anthology showcases the talents of Gaelic poets who have come to prominence since the turn of the millennium. The poems cover a diverse range of subjects including social concerns, identity, cultural exchange, love, land and language.

 

 

 

 

The Gaelic Writings of Donald Sinclair
Edited by Aonghas MacLeòid

Dòmhnall Mac na Ceàrdaich (Donald Sinclair, 1885–1932) is a crucial writer in the development of Gaelic literature in the early twentieth century. This study guide covers a range of issues and concerns in his work, including Scottish Nationalism, the Celtic Revival, land reform, migration, and religion.

 

 

 

Bho Pheairt Gu Hiort
By Iain Taylor

This is a Gaelic deep-dive into place-names and explains all the most common elements that appear in place-names accross Scotland. By the end of the book, readers will be able to piece together the meaning behind place-names across the country.

 

 

 

 

Hunting Captain Henley
By Ken Pratt

Young Billy Queen is angry. He’s going to find the English officer who bullied his dad in the army and probably kill him.  This bold, powerful novel tracks the progress of a tormented boy who turns into a subversive man hell-bent on vengeance.

 

 

 

 

Soraidh Slan le Hallaig
By Myles Campbell

Hallaig, Raasay, 1853. There are rumours that the people are going to be evicted by the landlord, Seòras Rainy, who keeps a tight rein on them with unreasonable rules, including a ban on marriage. This Gaelic historical novel explores power, love and the fight between tradition and change.

 

 

 

Fo Fhasgadh Beinn Chianabhail
By Mòrag Anna NicNèill

When Kenneth returns to the island after being away for years, he plans to make a good life for himself in his old house. But he soon realizes that things are not going to be as easy as he had hoped. This psychological, gothic thriller asks questions on home, madness, and the supernatural.

 

 

 

 

Rèis Mhòr Craobh na Nollaig
By Naomi Jones; illustrated by James Jones

A jolly Christmas story that sees three shiny friends race to be the star on top of the three. This picture book is geared towards children aged 3 – 7 years old.

 

 

 

Casan Cugallach
By Gwen Bowie

Introduce yourself to the trials of Donaidh, the wobbly legged spider! This picture book is suitable for readers aged 3 – 7.

 

 

 

 

Seachdain Seunta
By Cathy Mary Nic a’ Mhaoilein

At the start of the summer holidays, Eilidh is disappointed that all the girls have gone on holiday to interesting places. Then she meets Patrick and they, along with Eilidh’s dog Peasan, end up going on a time travelling adventure! For readers aged 8 – 12.

 

 

 

An Stàball
By Anne Ramsay

A gorgeous board book for babies and toddlers that will teach Gaelic words on animals.

 

 

 

 

Kip an Cuilean-mathain Bhreab-bhogsaidh
By Andy McFarlane

Kip is a Scottish bear cub. He practices martial arts and lives by the guiding principles of Taekwondo: Courtesy, Integrity, Perseverance, Self-Control, and Indomitable Spirit. This is a heartwarming picture book for readers aged 5 – 8, that addresses themes of inclusivity and resilience.

 

 

 

Jocky Gentoo: The Adventures of a Penguin in Scots
By Julia Donaldson; illustrated by Axel Scheffler; translated into Scots by James Robertson

Are ye aw set for a pole-tae-pole adventure? Jocky, a gallus wee gentoo penguin, is awa for the jaunt o a lifetime. But shairly he’ll no can hoddle aw the wey tae Antarctica? Ideal for readers aged 3 – 6 years old.

 

 

 

Awa Doon e Toon
By Julia Lynch; illustrated by Caitlin Moffat

In Awa Doon e Toon, we follow one boy as he travels into town but is thwarted by the unpredictable Scottish weather! This is a great introduction to Doric Scots for readers aged 3 – 6 years old.

 

 

 

Anesu agus na Creutairean Uisge
By Tawana Maramba; illustrated by Ann Macleod

Anesu is nervous about starting her first day in a new school. Join her and her classmates as they share stories of mythical creatures from across the world, bringing them closer together. For readers aged 5 – 10.

 

 

 

 

Am Prionnsa Beag
By Antoine de Saint-Exupery; adapted by Louise Greig; illustrated by Sarah Massini; translated into Gaelic by Gillebride Mac ‘IlleMhaoil

Scottish Gaelic translation of Louise Greig’s stylish adaptation of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s children’s classic bestseller The Little Prince for younger readers. It’s enchanting fable of a pilot crashed in the desert who wakes one morning to discover a most extraordinary boy standing before him with stories of remarkable worlds and characters, each offering an insight into what is important in life.

David Robinson finds that Allan Radcliffe’s second novel, Blurred Faces, impresses him just as much as Radcliffe’s debut.

 

Blurred Faces
By Allan Radcliffe
Published by Fairlight Books

 

Tinder began in 2012, Grindr in 2009 and ever since then, I can’t help thinking, the meet-cute in film and fiction has been on its way out. Allan Radcliffe’s Blurred Faces, for example, begins like this:

‘David lives 1.07 miles away. I walk the blue line on the screen of my phone, the usual thrill and shame in my body.’

David (or Davie as he then becomes once introductions are over) answers the door, and within a couple of pages, he and Jordan are  having sex. Barbara Cartland it ain’t.

You would have to loosen the stays of any traditional definition of romantic fiction to an extent before it would fit Blurred Faces.  And yet – what’s this? – only a couple of days later,  the two men are having a meal in a cafe-bistro on Edinburgh’s Elm Row, when Jordan  spills a drink over his shirt, Davie tries to mop it up over a napkin, and their hands meet ‘in full view of the street’ and well, I’ll let Davie take up the story:  ‘Course, my brain’s doing its dinger… I’ve forgotten how this is meant to work. Romance. Not that I’m looking.’

So yes, Romance. But straight afterwards, all its cliches undercut.

Or rather, reversed. Because that accidental meeting of hands is how romance used to begin in the pre-dating app age, those distant days when sex was something a relationship put some way off in the future rather than right at the starting post. The post-app age has different ways of expressing that state of wishful anxiety about hand-holding where one half of the couple doesn’t know whether or not their feelings are reciprocated by the other. These days, I presume, the equivalent is worrying over whether a text message like ‘Maybe we could meet again?’ counts as being too forward or whether putting an X at the end is too uncool. Jane Austen could crank out a whole chapter on how her heroines faced this precise emotional turmoil in Regency England. In the 21st century, all we can hope to match that with is a finger hovering over the Send button.

Yet so far, I must confess, I have been doing Allan Radcliffe – whose fiction I have admired since reading his McKittrick and Saltire shortlisted debut novel The Old Haunts – a disservice. Because the key question about Blurred Faces isn’t whether or not it is a romantic novel, but something that happens as soon as Davie opens the door to Jordan. And no, I don’t mean the sex.

What drives the entire novel is the fact that the two men – in their early forties, though both told the dating app they were in their late thirties – knew each other from school. Back then, when neither was out, Jordan was bullied relentlessly. Davie was one of the bullies – not the worst, but enough of one to feel guilty about it all these years later. Somehow, the fact that Jordan doesn’t remember this makes it all the worse. Is he just pretending not to recognise Davie from all those years ago or has he genuinely forgotten?

So that’s the story: a casual hook-up between Jordan, a language teacher from London on his first visit home for five years, and Davie, an unemployed barista who has just broken up with his boyfriend of 17 years. At the end of their first brief encounter, they go through the ‘panto of swapping numbers’ and that, you might think, will be that. A short story with an intriguing secret at its heart, but not a novel.

I can understand that critique. It was also made about The Old Haunts (another teacher coming back from London for a short-stay visit to his native Edinburgh) and I thought it was wrong there too. For one thing, the whole subject of just what it is that sparks a loving relationship from a casual encounter isn’t slight at all, but one of life’s great, delicious mysteries. Not only that, but it’s one that, of all art forms, the novel excels.

Why? Because it can handle complexity. In Blurred Faces that business of bullying at school isn’t the only buried secret between the two men. Both have lost a parent, and in the case of Jordan’s alcoholic dad, that death badly scarred the rest of the family. Both are emotionally fragile after having lost lovers: in Davie’s case, the collapse of his long-term relationship (one in which, significantly perhaps for our story, he and his partner never held hands) has left him feeling aimless, while Jordan is still shaken by his failure to realise that a younger man he had fantasised about wasn’t interested in him sexually.

The format –  alternate chapters from either Davie or Jordan’s point of view – is an obvious way of showing what each of the characters is missing about the other. It could be clunky but here it’s not, mainly because of the ease with which Radcliffe slips between his characters’ past and present. Just to take one example, the moment Davie realises who he’s just had sex with, that he’d known Jordan at school, is only later that night in the gay pub when he is drinking to assuage his raging loneliness. There’s a snooker game going on in the background as he remembers, some of his ex-lover’s mates are pointing him out, and all of this registers at least as much as the first stirrings of guilt over Jordan. In a couple of paragraphs inside Davie’s head, you have slid back – first by four hours and then by three decades – and you have hardly noticed at all.

Initially, the two men don’t seem to have much in common. At that first meeting, for example, while Davie answers the door in a T-shirt advertising Ingliston Truck and Trailer Fest 2004, Jordan is ‘smart and sober, like he’d taken a wrong turn on his way to the Lyceum’. And although that dark schooldays secret hangs between them, they have other shared memories too. Both have lived through times when anti-gay prejudice was rife, when they would be terrified of being seen in a gay disco by any of their parents’ friends or anyone from school. And though some yobs catcall them as they walk down the street together, times have clearly changed; We’re mainstream now,’ Davie says. ‘We’ve assimilated.’

Radcliffe writes with an enviably economical and engaging style. The secondary characters do more than just triangulate the relationship of Jordan and Davie –  Jordan’s brother Niall and his retired nurse mother are particularly well drawn. The Edinburgh background – the city has, according to VisitBritain, ‘the largest gay scene in the country’ – is equally true to life: indeed, with so many of the places mentioned retaining their authentic names, Blurred Faces is probably the most clearly Edinburgh-focussed novel I have read for a long time.

 

Blurred Faces, by Allan Radcliffe, is published by Fairlight Books, priced £10.99.

The latest exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland is a celebration of the work of pioneering photographer Alfred Buckham. The accompanying book is packed with amazing images and explores his astounding working methods. Here are a selection of images from the book.

 

Alfred Buckham: Daredevil Photographer
By Louise Pearson
Published by National Galleries of Scotland

 

 

Alfred Buckham: Daredevil Photographer by Louise Pearson is published by National Galleries of Scotland, priced £19.99.

What would we do without our marvellous booksellers? They’re always on hand to give readers just the right book for any occasion. So as we near the festive season, and we think about gifts, who better as about their favourite Scottish books of the year. Here are some brilliant books from some of Scotland’s best booksellers!

 

Recommendations from Rebecca Wall at Night Owl Books, East Linton

Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman, by Callum Robinson

Robinson’s intensely readable memoir is stunningly written, and incredibly broad in scope. Part nature writing, part coming-of-age tale, Ingrained skilfully explores the relationship between fathers and sons, the challenges faced by small businesses, and the importance of craftsmanship in an increasingly digital world. A well-deserved winner of the Indie Book Awards for Non-Fiction 2025.

Cold Kitchen: A Year of Culinary Travels, by Caroline Eden

Journeying between the author’s kitchen in Edinburgh’s New Town and her travels to Central Asia, the Baltics, and beyond, Cold Kitchen is a mouth-watering exploration of the importance of food in our lives, and its ability to transport us across time and space without ever leaving the table. Divided into twelve chapters that chart the changing seasons of the year, each focusing on a single recipe and journey, this exquisitely written memoir is a must-read for anyone with an interest in food or travel.

The Mourning Necklace, by Kate Foster

Just when I thought I couldn’t love Foster’s writing any more than I already did, she released The Mourning Necklace, her third novel. Based on the true-life story of Maggie Dickson, a young woman who survived her execution by hanging in eighteenth-century Edinburgh, The Mourning Necklace is a moving historical novel that is bitingly relevant to our own times.

 

Recommendations from Lindsay Macgregor at Atkinson Pryce, Biggar

Witches: A King’s Obsession, by Steven Veerapen

This book provides a measured insight into the role of King James VI and I in igniting the witch-hunts which blazed across Scotland and England. It examines where our perceptions and stereotypes about witches emanated from and it explores, unflinchingly, how alleged witches were identified, tortured and punished.  As Veerapen states, it’s “a sobering reminder that history is not always a progressive march to enlightenment but frequently one which sees many stumbles, wrong turns, and reactionary waves of violence and brutality.”  I found it a fascinating read for anyone interested in early modern history, witch hunts, or the rationale behind the irrational.

How to Kill a Witch, A Guide for the Patriarchy, by Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi

This is another fascinating book about women accused as witches, rich in historical detail but also providing insights on the patriarchal context in which witchcraft accusations flourish.  The range of sources is impressive, including testimony from “experts” and witnesses, transcripts from trials, and portrayals of the women accused. I also appreciated the chapter on present-day witch hunts. It’s a harrowing read but the authors bring wit and compassion to a story which is as relevant as ever.

The Cadence of a Song: The Life of Margaret Fay Shaw, by Fiona J MacKenzie, 

This biography relates the remarkable story of Margaret Fay Shaw, the American-born musician and folklorist who documented and preserved the traditions, lore and songs of the Hebrides at her home on Canna.  The biographer, herself a noted musician with Gaelic fluency, brings knowledge and expertise to our understanding of Shaw’s life commitment, work and legacy. And I particularly appreciated anecdotes and insights from people who met and knew Shaw.  A very engaging read whether or not you’ve come across Margaret Fay Shaw before.

 

Recommendation from Elaine Sinclair at Daydreams Bookshop, Milngavie

Kitten Heels, by Margaret Cullen

It’s full of wonderful Glasgow charm and patter. In essence, it’s a coming-of-age tale dealing with dark issues which faced many communities living by the Clyde in the 1960s, but it brings hope and humour at the same time. A real wee gem of a book.

 

Recommendations from Samantha and Stephen at The Nairn Bookshop, Nairn

Drystone: A Life Rebuilt, by Kristie de Garis

With splashes of humour, this memoir skilfully sets out the difficulties of managing a childhood move from town to country, racism and bullying, and the traumas borne of an uncertain start in life. Never dwelling overly long on its powerful central image of drystone walling, this beautiful book illustrates how a shift in pace, embracing non-traditional work and family structures, and hard-won self-learning can make for a far more fulfilling life.

Fower Pessoas, by Colin Bramwell

A remarkable act of reimagining, this is translation, or rather transcreation, of Fernando Pessoa’s poetry into vernacular Scots is carried out with wit and playfulness, and with a cipher at its heart.

The River, by Craig A. Smith

An everyday epic, we meet protagonist Lachlan McCormack in a nursing home, then learn about his earlier life, drifting along with him. A brilliant book about how loss, love and shocks shape Lachlan’s life, with Scotland and its evolving politics as a gentle character in its own right.

 

Recommendation from Kirsty Smith at the RIAS Bookshop, Edinburgh

Art Deco Scotland by Bruce Peter

Beautifully illustrated with images and photographs from the HES archive and the author’s own collection this book is a comprehensive guide to architecture and design across Scotland in the interwar period. Alongside familiar buildings like Portobello Lido, the Dominion Cinema and Basil Spence’s Southern Motors Garage there is an impressive range of structures from all sectors documented within its pages. Some particular favourites are the surprisingly elegant power stations and colliery baths featured in the chapter on Industry and Energy and the fabulous story of the Bennie Railplane at Milngarvie.

 

Recommendations from Carly Penderis at The Wee Bookshop, Dollar

Muckle Flugga, by Michael Pedersen

I loved this lyrical explosion of a book . The prose rather like Michael himself just leaps joyously off the page and you can’t help smiling with delight. The narration is evocative and elemental and the story an intimate portrayal of love, loss, masculinity and island life. I adored this book.

Only Here Only Now, by Tom Newlands

A stunning debut novel. I devoured this book and fell in love with Cora the main character. Despite the setting amidst poverty grief and hardship it is hopeful and uplifting and written with such tender empathy – never patronising . I often still think of Cora and wonder what she is up to now …I’m delighted to hear there is a sequel on the way !

Recommendations from Molly Drummond at the Portobello Bookshop, Edinburgh

Foreign Fruit, by Katie Goh
Who Will Be Remembered Here, edited by Lewis Hetherington & CJ Mahony

Two of my favourite Scottish books this year (although it’s hard to choose) are non-fiction titles! Foreign Fruit is a measured yet powerful examination of the history, symbolism and travels of the orange told through the lens of Katie Goh’s family history. The Edinburgh-based writer begins their investigation with the fruit bowl on their parents’ kitchen table and goes on to cross continents and follow historic trade routes, all in the pursuit of big questions about memory, family and identity. Meanwhile, Who Will Be Remembered Here is a fantastic anthology from Historic Environment Scotland packed to the brim full of stories of queer spaces in Scotland, with a host of brilliant authors – like Damian Barr, Amanda Thomson and Ali Smith, to name a few – shedding new light on places in Scotland that matter to both their personal history and Scotland’s history at large.

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you’re of a certain vintage, and we are here at BooksfromScotland, it was a BIG DEAL who got the number one single slot for Christmas. And we all have our favourites. Marc Burrows has written an entertaining history about the pop charts at Christmas, and here he gives his thoughts on his five favourite number ones!

 

The Story of the Christmas No. 1: Mistletoe & Vinyl
By Marc Burrows
Published by McNidder & Grace

 

1) Slade – Merry Xmas Everybody (1973) 

There are some Christmas songs that are non-negotiables. This is one of them. It’s built completely into the structure of our annual celebrations, to the point that Doctor Who, on more than one occasion, uses our familiarity with its opening bars as a quick short hand to say ‘this scene is set at Christmas by the way’. It’s almost impossible to be raised in Britain and not know Slade’s ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’. 50 years on, it’s written into cultural DNA. There’s two other reasons for picking it though, aside from sheer ubiquity. Firstly, this was the first true Christmas no. 1. It’s the one that started them all. Before Slade no-one had any real interest in what was number one at Christmas, after 1973 that changed. This was year zero for the tradition. Secondly, and I think this often gets overlooked, ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ is an incredible pop single. Most Christmas songs, including Slade’s 1973 rivals Wizzard, instinctively go maximalist, throwing Phil Spector’s kitchen sink at the recording studio and drenching the clangs it makes with reverb and jingle bells. Slade don’t do any of that. This is a really lean rock song, with chords that slash rather than jangle, and a grounding shuffle beat. Jim Lea’s bass line, which dances in and out of the slashes, gives it some musicality, but otherwise this is rock n’ roll cut to the bone and then topped with one of the best set of pop lyrics ever written. Altogether now, ‘Does yer granny always tell ya, that the old songs are the best?’

2) Rage Against The Machine – Killing In The Name (2009) 

 It’s hard to think of a less Christmassy piece of music than the LA rap-metal agitators’ breakthrough song, but that’s okay. No-one ever said Christmas No. 1 had to be Christmassy, did they? Again, there’s two reasons for this being here. Firstly it’s a rock masterpiece. Literally one of the best rock singles ever recorded; an anthem for saying ‘no’, for fighting back against the narratives imposed upon us. Zak De La Roche’s lyrics, about a freed slave’s exhilaration when he finally refused his enslaver, resonate with anyone taking a stand against pretty much everything, up to and including, it has to be said, having to tidy your bedroom. And that brings us to the second reason. ‘Killing In The Name’ became Christmas no. 1 exactly for its spirit of riot and rebellion. 2009 was peak X-Factor, when Simon Cowell thought he owned the December charts. The campaign to get RATM to number one ahead of that year’s X-Factor champ, poor old Joe McElderry, was a nation saying, as one, “NO! This weird tradition is ours, and it’s too important to let a TV show dictate it to us”. Slade’s ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ was the first time the Christmas No. 1 mattered to people … Rage Against The Machine was probably one of the last. 

 

3) Mr Blobby – Mr Blobby (1993) 

Look, it’s a horrible song. I know that. It’s musically irredeemable, it’s irritating, vacuous and almost painful to listen to. But hear me out, because that doesn’t matter. What matters is how gloriously, brilliantly weird its very existence is. No other country on Earth would have let this single get to number one, let alone in the biggest chart week of the year. In no other country, anywhere in the universe, probably, would a spoof kids TV monster invented to prank celebrities on Saturday tea-time telly become a symbol of oddly loveable anarchy. The whole Blobby story is completely unique, entirely British and monumentally bonkers. I’d be happy to never actually hear it again as long as I live, but good grief … what a time to be alive. 

 

4) Band Aid – Do They Know It’s Christmas (1984) 

 I’m going to do something fairly unfashionable here. I’m going to go to bat for Band Aid. People will rightly point to Bob Geldof and Midge Ure’s song as a fundraising achievement, and as a cultural moment that redefined charitable giving on a national level. And fair play, that is absolutely its legacy. At the time Geldof said he didn’t care if people liked the song, as long as they bought it and saved a life. I can’t fault that. But I also think the focus on the context does it a disservice. ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ is a brilliant song. And yes, I’m aware that’s not a very fashionable view these days, and I’m also well aware that its lyrics are naive. You don’t need me to point out that there actually *will* be snow in Africa, somewhere, most Christmases. That it’s not a place where ‘nothing ever grows’, and that as there’s a 65% Christian population in Ethiopia, they probably do, indeed, know it’s Christmas. Despite all that, I think there’s a genuine heart and real charm to it. The way it was thrown together, dragged out of chaos with its rough edges intact still makes it sound interesting, far more so than any of its sequels. The lyrics are plaintive and heartfelt. Especially it’s most controversial line, Bono’s ‘Tonight thank god it’s them instead of you’. People point to that lyric as selfish or insensitive, but to me it’s urgent and genuine. There but by the grace of god go we. It hammers the point home, starkly, and Bono’s urgent delivery is what makes it. And, well, there’s no more powerful a phrase in pop, surely, than ‘feed the world’?  

 

5) WHAM! – Last Christmas (2023/2024) 

George Michael was always a tiny bit bitter about Band Aid. He was proud to be involved, obviously, and was fully behind the cause (even donating the royalties from ‘Last Christmas’ itself to famine relief), but he also resented it. Because ‘Last Christmas’ was meant to be his crowning moment – a fourth number one in 1984, following peerless pop masterpieces ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go Go’, ‘Careless Whisper’ and ‘Freedom’. Capping a perfect year. Plus George loved Christmas. He lived for it, buying his friends extravagant presents, even going carol singing around the neighbourhood. Christmas No.1 really meant something to him, and he hoped Band Aid would come and go in a single week, allowing his song to swoop in and take the crown at the last minute. Alas, it wasn’t to be. ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ proved unstoppable – literally the best selling British single of all time at that point. Which is a shame, because George really had composed a pop masterpiece, sad and lovely, soulful and a little bit raw. Fortunately, the evolving nature of pop media has been kind. Once downloads, and later streaming started to dominate the top 40 it opened the field for a myriad of Christmas classics to return to the chart every year. In 2023 George finally got his wish, alas too late for him to ever know. ‘Last Christmas’ went to number one in the week of December 25th, a feat it repeated the following year for its 40th anniversary. A belated, but extremely well-deserved triumph. There’s every chance it’ll be there again in 2025. Who knows, maybe ‘Last Christmas’ is now the ultimate Christmas No. 1? Forever occupying the holiest chart of the year. And would that really be such a bad thing? 

 

The Story of the Christmas No. 1: Mistletoe & Vinyl by Marc Burrows is published by McNidder & Grace, priced £14.99.

Benbecula is Graeme Macrae Burnet’s addition to the excellent Darklands series of books published by Polygon. It tells the tale of a real life murder on the island in the 19th century as narrated by the murderer’s brother. We hope you enjoy this extract.

 

Benbecula
By Graeme Macrae Burnet
Published by Polygon

 

In happier times our family consisted of myself, my father, my mother, my three siblings and aunt – that is my father’s sister – who lived in a smaller dwelling a few yards behind our own and took most of her meals with us. Though they were not related by blood, my mother and my aunt were of such similar physical type, being likewise squat, big-bosomed and wide in the hip, that they were often taken to be twins. If it had been my father’s intention to seek the image of his sister when he had taken a wife he could have done no better. The weather in these parts is harsh. Throughout the black months our island is lashed with rain and gales blow continually off the sea. Women of my mother and aunt’s type are as well adapted to this climate here as the black-faced sheep that seem oblivious to the elements. They were ill-natured women and their conversation consisted mainly of plaints about their circumstances and the denigration of our neighbours. 

My father was taller and lean in the face and body. When not anchored by a cas-chrom or flaughter you might fear the wind would carry him off. And feeble as he was in body he was likewise in character, being placid and biddable. I never heard him raise his voice in anger and he met good and ill fortune with the same apathy. Had he had the opportunity to be informed of his death at the hands of his own son, he would likely have replied, Ach, these things happen. 

Of we four siblings Marion was the eldest and best, and it is her removal from this place that pains me most. She herited not from my mother’s side but my father’s, being slender and long-faced. She was strong and never one to shirk labour more fitted to men but there was a solemnity about her. Laughter did not come readily to her lips and she appeared to take more satisfaction in the service of others than in her own pleasure. Of John, the youngest, there is little to be said. He was my father’s replica in character but more simple-minded. He was not work-shy but required constant supervision and praise. We were none of us MacPhees greatly educated but John was incapable of learning anything. If he one day dropped a stone on his foot, he would the next day drop another stone on his foot and treat the pain he experienced with the same idiotic surprise. He was neither melancholy nor cheerful, and if there was ever a gathering of some sort it was difficult to recall if he had been present or not. Unless John takes it upon himself to procreate – and I fear he has not the wherewithal– I will be the last of the MacPhees of Liniclate. That is no bad thing. It is a poisoned lineage and no one round here shall lament our extinction. 

Which brings us to the individual this narrative most concerns and who bears responsibility for my solitary existence. Angus was from the beginning quite singular. From the moment he could walk, he was never still. He would tear around the house upsetting whatever objects were set upon the table, unmoved by our mother’s reprimands. She often grabbed and slapped him mercilessly but this had no effect. Outside he would chase after livestock which greatly antagonised our neighbours. I do not think he intended any harm to the beasts he chased. Rather I think he was simply in thrall to his own impact on the world. As a child he continually indulged in pranks and would laugh uncontrollably if someone tripped on a wire he had set or was soaked by a pail of water he had balanced above a door. The beatings such transgressions earned him were no deterrent. Angus was never cowed by authority, whether that of the priest, his teachers or the ground officers who were on his account frequent visitors to our house. Despite this, there was something endearing about him. His laughter infected people even as they chastised him and he had a way of looking contrite and then casting up his eyes and smiling that disarmed even those who sought his punishment. On account of the five years which separated us we were not close. I did not enjoy the attention he attracted and would take myself as far from him as possible. As a result I acquired a reputation of being truculent and aloof and it may be true that I was what people supposed me to be. It was only when Angus reached the age at which certain changes visit the body that he became properly troublesome. Certain traits that may be excused in a child are less easily forgiven in a man. From the moment he grew hair on his balls Angus had a shameless fascination for those parts of his body and their functions that decency normally dictates are kept private. Perhaps on account of his degenerate habits, he ceased to grow beyond the age of fourteen or so. He was squat like our mother, but barrel-chested and powerful. When he moved across the landscape, he seemed to do so with preternatural speed. There was also something hideous in his demeanour. He had no nameable deformity, yet even those encountering him for the first spurned him. By this time I would be gathering seaware, hard at work on the rig or sometimes labouring for a few shillings on the dykes and tracks of the parish. Through this industry, I sought to differentiate myself from Angus, yet I was haunted by the sense that I was not his opposite but his mirror image. 

 

Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet is published by Polygon, priced £12.00.

David Robinson finds a lot to love in Andrew O’ Hagan’s collection of essays On Friendship.

 

On Friendship
By Andrew O’ Hagan
Published by Faber

 

One day next spring I will climb Cairnpapple Hill. I will only go on a clear day, because the whole point of Cairnpapple Hill – about three miles north-east of Bathgate -  is that from it you can see both of Scotland’s coasts. It is, Wikipedia tells me, a Marilyn (meaning that it is at least 150m high) and has been used as a ritual site for at least 4,000 years. That’s two facts I didn’t know, and when I check how far away it is, there’s a third: by car it will only take me 45 minutes to get there.  Easy.  

Yet when  I do go up Cairnpapple Hill (the site reopens in April), it won’t be for any of those reasons. It will be because of Andrew O’Hagan’s latest book, On Friendship. In it, he writes about walking there with his friends Karl Miller, the writer, critic and founding editor of the London Review of Books (where O’Hagan is editor-at-large), and Seamus Heaney. I have interviewed Miller once, O’Hagan four or five times, and Heaney not at all. I can imagine their friendship – just – but I can’t imagine the view. 

Both Heaney and Miller are dead now, but that  hasn’t wiped them from O’Hagan’s consciousness. If anything, the opposite has happened. ‘Death,’ O’Hagan writes, ‘doesn’t really end friendship; it sanctifies it. It makes the closeness permanent.’ Or again: ‘The greatest friendships can never really end. They embody one’s basic faith in togetherness: you are just another body suspended in air until someone puts out a hand to you.’ 

Look again at those quotes and try to find grief in them. If it is there at all, it is buried in gratitude, or appreciation of how friendship brings out the deepest joys in life – ‘all the sweets of being’ in Boswell’s phrase from A Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides as he looked back on the conversations he had enjoyed with Samuel Johnson.  

O’Hagan’s friendship with Heaney, Edna O’Brien and so many more leading writers mentioned in this book – sometimes while making their own tours in these islands – is similarly joyous and vitalising. Nor is it remotely one-sided: the framed and personally inscribed manuscript of Heaney’s poem ‘Postscript’ in his Primrose Hill home is testament to that, as is the fact that O’Brien chose him to give her eulogy at her funeral last year. Proof, if any were needed, that alongside his talents as a writer, Andrew O’Hagan has an impressive talent for friendship too.  

We already knew that from his  ‘almost completely autobiographical’ (his words) 2020 novel Mayflies. In it, Jimmy, the bookish teenage narrator, goes with his best friend Tully and their working-class Ayrshire mates on a booze-and drug-fuelled weekend of music and mayhem in 1986 Manchester. Thirty years later, when he has carved out a successful career as a writer in London, Tully tells him he has terminal cancer and asks him to ‘help him across the line’.     

That happened in real life when Keith Martin – the charismatic lead singer in their short-lived band Big Gun – got in touch in 2017. O’Hagan was  already well into writing what he had always planned to be his magnum opus, Caledonian Road, a state-of-the-nation novel (61 characters, 641 pages, 10 years in the writing) which covers an almost indecently wide stretch of society, ranging from polo-playing royal hangers-on at Windsor to Bangladeshi women sweatshop workers in Leicester.  But the demands of friendship couldn’t wait, and he put it aside to work on the narrower, but arguably deeper canvas of a 1980s teenage kicks seen through the prism of a middle-age Scottish litterateur in London. 

On most readings, those two worlds don’t mix. The successful Scot returns 30 years on and is embarrassed, or condescends, or feels guilty. He has left his roots behind, grown out of his long-ago friends, gone on to better things.  Yet that’s not the story in Mayflies, nor is it the story in O’Hagan’s own life. His working-class teenage friends, he insists, were as bright and sparky as any he has met since, even though as editor-at-large at the London Review of Books, he met any number of bright and sparky people. In fiction as in real life Jimmy/O’Hagan doesn’t  dream of quietly dropping them. Because not only can true friendships endure, but sometimes the people that we meet when we are still only partially grown-up are the best people we ever will meet.  

There is, in other words, an impressive social breadth behind O’Hagan’s writing in general and his writing about friendship in particular. Keith Martin’s death made him realise that ‘friendship was a subject that had laid unannounced at the centre of my writing life’. In On Friendship he puts it in focus, from the early friendships formed with neighbouring boys on his Irvine scheme (‘the first great challenge of our social lives is to find a friend who might somehow match our capacity for wonder’) to arranging a first meeting with Edna O’Brien for dinner at the Wolsey (‘Ask for the corner table,’ she tells him. ‘Lucien Freud’s table. If he’s not there they always give it to me.’)  

In eight elegant essays, O’Hagan expands his thoughts on friendship to include lost friends, pets, imaginary friends, and workmates. Throughout, he insists on its importance: as great or greater, in most of our lives, than romantic love. A good friend, he says, ‘is a lesson in empathy that no one can do without’, but he sets the bar high. Friendship demands the best of us: not taking offence when offence is implied; resisting making everything about you; being generous when down on your luck; lightening someone else’s mood when feeling low yourself; defending your friend when it would be easier to keep quiet or drop in a bit of poisonous gossip. And because true friendship IS so important, it’s pointless wasting one’s time on false friends, those ‘who think everybody is a contact’, and those who just enjoy the psychodrama of involving someone else in their own angst.   

Maybe, he fears, true friendship is becoming rarer. Perhaps the nature of friendship did indeed change between 1990 and 2010 with the advent of the internet and social media. As I write this, for example, a story appears in my news feed telling me that 54 per cent of Americans ‘have some sort of relationship with an artificial intelligence platform’ and that for 28 per cent of them that relationship was ‘intimate or romantic’. What does this mean for friendship? Will our best friends soon be bots? Has ‘friending’ someone on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, where we know precisely what version of themselves they want to project to the world, replaced befriending someone in real life when we find out what they think for ourselves? 

Yet even such a potentially wonderful thing as true friendship has limits. Sex is one of them, but so too is asking a question like ‘What do you really think of me?’ Walking up Cairnpapple Hill or anywhere else, a true friend wouldn’t need to ask. 

 

 On Friendship by Andrew O’Hagan is published by Faber, priced £12.99.

 

Poor Creatures in Mairi Kidd’s latest historical novel which looks at Mary Shelley’s time in Scotland as a teenager and imagines its influence in the creation of Frankenstein. We chatted to Mairi Kidd about the genesis of the book.

 

Poor Creatures
By Mairi Kidd
Published by Black & White

 

Mairi, I’m sure it’s lovely to see another novel of yours out in the world; what can you tell our readers about Poor Creatures?

Thank you – it’s a strange and slightly scary time, when the book becomes ‘real’ after being a file on a laptop for so long!

Poor Creatures introduces readers to a group of wild, wonderful and occasionally wretched women, all of whom lived in the early years of the nineteenth century. There’s Margaret, a seamstress imprisoned in Bedlam, and Isabel, the teenage daughter of a family of Dundee radicals. Harriet is the very young, pregnant wife of a poet trying to cope with an itinerant existence. Mary-Jane is a translator and publisher eking out a living in London and struggling with the trials of being a second wife and stepmother.

What all of these women have in common is a link to Mary Godwin, better known by her married name of Mary Shelley. When Mary was a teenager, she was sent away from home, first to Ramsgate and later to Dundee. The book picks up her story as she arrives in Scotland, and forms an intense bond with Isabel. In writing it, I wanted to do some ‘visible mending’ where there are gaping holes in Mary’s story, and invite the reader to consider how Frankenstein may have cast a shadow over Mary, and Mary in turn over the other women in her life.

 

What drew you to this part of Mary Shelley’s life?

The idea was actually suggested to me by my publisher. I had been in a TV programme about Mary Shelley’s links with Dundee, and then had rather put her out of my mind. When Ali McBride at Black and White asked if I thought there was a book in it, I did initially wonder whether there was anything new to say. I started researching fairly idly, and the first thing that happened was that I wondered some more about whether there was a story there, because there is a real paucity of material about that period in Mary’s life. But I kept on reading, and then it seemed that alarm bells were going off in my head constantly. It’s a period in which absolutely unthinkable things happened. A girl is sent away from home, apparently because there is something wrong with her arm. Somehow this arm issue affects her father’s trust in her. A man marries a girl half his age, she dies – we know not how – and then he marries her younger sister. A poet runs away with a schoolgirl, then abandons her and runs away with another schoolgirl. Two young women kill themselves. It’s all hugely troubling, and it seems to me that there has been a distinct lack of curiosity about these events among Mary’s biographers. Lots of things are taken at face value, ignored, or explained away. One might begin to suspect that the paucity of records could have happened on purpose…

Once all that was in my head, I decided I thought there was a novel in it after all – but I didn’t just want to focus on Mary. I wanted also to explore the other women in her life.

 

You focus of the kinship, loyalties, and jealousies between friends and sisters rather than the characters romantic relationships. Why did you make this choice?

There are two slightly different answers to this.

The first is simple(ish): when we meet Mary and Isabel in the novel, they are very young, and so it seemed to me natural that friendships versus love affairs would be central to their lives. We know their friendship was important to Mary because she wrote as much down; a break came later, and when they met again, Mary told people that Isabel was mad. That seems to me a pretty unpleasant thing to do to one’s supposed friend today, let alone in Regency England where reputation was all-important. That action of Mary’s makes me even surer that the friendship was quite an intense one; I see the falling-out as the flip side, the hate as fierce as the love.

The second answer is that I wonder about the Mary/Shelley relationship. Shelley didn’t believe in monogamy and there were always other women around. Some of them may have been around because Mary invited them, which is slightly disturbing. Did she arrange them as proxies? When Shelley died, Mary did not remarry and later in life she would say she became ‘tousy mousy’ for other women. I wonder whether her relationships with women were actually the major relationships of her life.

Alongside all this, I was also interested in playing with ideas of how Isabel and Mary might have – separately and/or together – started to become writers. We know Mary wrote as a young girl, but those papers were also ‘lost’.

 

You often write about history from a woman’s point of view, would you ever consider writing a novel in a contemporary setting? What is it about history that fascinates you?

I suppose I was pre-destined to be interested in history; my mum was a history teacher, my dad studied history, and I come from a long line of people who told stories of a type that might be called oral histories. I’m not the right person to be a historian, though, I always want to go a step further and try to imagine how people felt, how they thought – to step into their shoes, I suppose. Conjuring a world through places and things is such a lovely thing to do – it’s something historical fiction shares with fantasy, that element of world-building. It also lets us do that ‘visible mending’ trick of writing people back into the story, and for me that’s so important as women have been so badly neglected – or straight-up traduced – in traditional histories for so long. Of course it also lends us a lens to look at contemporary issues, how we have progressed – or not – and the roots of issues that may still plague us today. That’s the appeal for me.

I have written contemporary pieces for stage and TV and I have modern novel drafts at various stages from various periods in my life – they don’t half date quickly, though! I would never say never to writing about the present day; if I thought the time and the idea were right, I would certainly give it a go. The next book I’m working on is set further back than Poor Creatures, but the one after that does come forward in time quite a bit. It’s not modern, but it feels modern by comparison with my last books.

 

There’s a cheeky epilogue in the story concerning an old doll. Without giving any spoilers, what were you looking to explore with that addition?

I had fun writing that part. It’s partly just about the unknowability of the past and how easy it can be to overlook significance, while, simultaneously, many of us attribute all sorts of significance to old objects and may have a desire to own them – almost to ‘own the past’. It’s partly a tribute to textile crafts and all of the things women (and children) owned and made in history that haven’t been recognised as important, whether tangible or intangible. The doll appears elsewhere in the book, too, where it links to the Frankenstein idea of an inanimate object made animate. And I suppose I wanted to play with the idea of dolls as slightly uncanny. The doll is based on two separate real-life examples, one of which conceals a secret (readers can find out more in the end-notes if they wish). Oh, and it’s also my little tribute to one of my favourite books, A.S.Byatt’s Possession, but I won’t say any more on that for fear of spoilering!

 

What do you think Frankenstein offers the modern reader? Why is it still relevant today?

I think Frankenstein can be read in all sorts of ways. I spoke with a writer recently who saw the creature as an analogy for AI; I see him as reading across to a lot of modern bioethical debates, to the climate crisis, to the ways that children and young people – and indeed all of us – are being reprogrammed in a way by social media. It’s very human to create something, unleash it, and only then ask questions about what might happen next.

It is, of course, also a classic work of Gothic fiction and Gothic fiction is perennial; if Angela Carter was right in the 70s to say we lived in ‘Gothic times’, the modern world must be reckoned at least as challenging.

There is also something amazing about the fact that this book was written by such a young woman. I don’t think I ‘like’ Mary but I am fascinated by her and I do think she was – as a writer – a genius.

 

Now that we are nearing the end of 2025, what has been your favourite Scottish book this year?

That’s a tough question, there have been many wonderful books this year. In my day job at the Saltire Society, we deliver The Saltires, Scotland’s National Book Awards and I am very glad I only administer and don’t judge! I was lucky enough to go to Germany in Spring with Scottish Books International and discovered David Farrier’s gorgeously written, fascinating, clever books on the trip, so I will pick Nature’s Genius as a favourite among favourites.

 

Poor Creatures by Mairi Kidd is published by Black & White, priced £16.99.

Lari Don is a powerhouse when it comes to children’s books on Scotland’s myths and legends. Her latest book widens her scope across all the Celtic nations, and is a beautiful collection of tales with stunning illustrations from Elise Carmichael. We asked Lari to tell us about her inspirations.

Celtic Folk and Fairy Tales
By Lari Don, Illustrated by Elise Carmichael
Published by Floris

Celtic Connections 

I’ve always loved stories about kelpies, changelings and selkies. I’ve always loved Scottish traditional tales. Not in a ‘my stories are better than your stories’ way, because all traditional tales are wonderful and valuable, but in a ‘these are the unique stories from the land and landscape I know and love, let me share them with you!’ way. 

So, I remember being a bit … surprised, when I realised that shapeshifting waterhorses  weren’t just a Scottish thing. There are, for example, shapeshifting waterhorses in Ireland, Wales and the Isle of Man. The name may be different – each-uisce, ceffyl dŵr, glashtin, rather than kelpie – but the magical beast is equally beautiful and dangerous. (Discover my version of the Manx waterhorse story from Celtic Folk and Fairy Tales in this video!) 

And it’s not just Scottish fairies who steal children and leave changelings in their place, or who mess about with time. There are Irish changelings, and Breton fairies have odd time-twisting powers. 

And it’s not only on Scottish coasts and islands that people tell tales of seals who shed their skins and become human. There are selkies swimming, singing and dancing on other shores too.  

At first I was surprised. ‘Oh, these stories aren’t just Scottish?’ Then I was excited! Because I’ve always been interested in the connections between stories told in different places, stories that are spoken out loud rather than written down, stories that travel with people as they move around the world.   

So are there waterhorses and selkies everywhere? No, it turns out, there aren’t. Not many of them, anyway. Some stories are genuinely international, for example dragons roar in many locations, and Cinderella-type tales are ancient and very widespread. But these tales, the waterhorses who want to steal you away and eat you, the fairies who mess with time and steal babies, the shapeshifting seals, are mainly told in… the Celtic lands. (Not just here, though. I’m sure someone will be able to tell me about similar stories elsewhere, and I will be excited about those too!)  

However, there are specific magical images, beings, monsters and lore – particularly shapeshifters, strong women, water creatures and human-sized fairies – which tend to turn up, similar but with intriguing differences, in one particular part of the world. In the lands on the northwest coast of Europe: Scotland, Ireland, Wales, the Isle of Man, Cornwall and Brittany. Lands connected by similar languages, and by the sea, which in the past was often an easier way to travel than by land. 

As I learnt more about tales from other Celtic lands, I became fascinated by them too. That’s why I wanted to create a collection of Celtic tales, to share my fascination and love of these magical stories. 

Celtic Folk and Fairy Tales is that collection! Filled with waterhorses, fairies, monsters, giants, piskies, selkies and so much magic! And every story is beautifully illustrated by the wonderful Elise Carmichael.  

I hope you find this collection of tales fascinating, and possibly a wee bit surprising, just like I found the kelpies’ Celtic cousins…  

 

Celtic Folk and Fairy Tales by Lari Don & illustrated by Elise Carmichael is published by Floris, priced £16.99.

Francine Toon follows up her McIllvanney prize-winning debut, Pine, with Bluff, another gothic thriller, this time set in the fictional coastal town of St Rule, inspired by St Andrews. We spoke to Francine about Bluff.

 

Bluff
By Francine Toon
Published by Transworld

 

Congratulations, Francine, on the publication of your new novel, Bluff. Tell us what you wanted to explore in writing it? 
 
I think we all have that one friend we lost touch with from school. I wanted to explore the idea of trying to look them up online and finding nothing. When my main character, Cameron, returns home to Fife for Christmas, he starts to become worried when no one seems to know what happened to his friend Joanie, last seen at a post-exam party, ten years ago.  
I also wanted to explore the area of north east Fife where I spent my teenage years, and how things that happened in the past can create a butterfly effect in the present.  
 

Your debut, Pine, had a fantastic reception. Did you have the difficult second novel syndrome when you were writing Bluff? 
 
I think I did, yes. It was a learning process for me, finding my way into the story. Bluff took on a number of different forms before this one, which I think is the most compelling and satisfying – I really hope readers enjoy it.  
 

Though Bluff isn’t quite dark academia, the social perils of life at that late-teenage stage is a key component to the plot. Why do you think the dark side of university life and the university town is proving so popular to readers just now? 
 
The world is quite a daunting and often scary place right now. I think there is something comforting about being cloistered away in a medieval university town, like the one in Bluff, even if there are dark histories to explore. I definitely felt that way actually living in St Andrews, which I’ve reimagined slightly differently as the town of St Rule in my novel. Who doesn’t want to puzzle over an ancient manuscript with a cup of tea in the university library? We could all do with a bit of escapism. It’s also an environment that can become claustrophobic and intense, even ritualistic – which definitely captures the imagination. 
 

Your settings are always atmospheric and add that sense of gothic menace to your novels. What is it about the Scottish landscape that inspires this in your writing?  
 
I feel lucky to have spent my formative years surrounded by sprawling pine forests, windswept beaches, crumbling castles and gothic architecture. How could I not write about them? Some writers are inspired by the landscape to write romance but I have always been drawn to darker mysteries, influenced by stories I heard growing up of ghosts, witches and Viking burial sites.  
 

Bluff is written with a dual-timeline narrative. How do you manage to keep on top of the challenge of maintaining the suspense and providing the reveals at the rights times? 
 
Well, it certainly was a challenge to get two timelines to sync up and interact with each other, at least at first. At one stage I had a list of plot beats and mapped out how the chapters would all work together. Towards the end of the editing process, making changes such as moving a chapter or taking one out altogether meant that it had a knock on effect for the whole book!  
 

Were there any books and/or authors that inspired your writing this time round? 
 
Iain Banks was definitely looming in the background of the writing process. My main character Cameron was inspired in part by Prentice McHoan, the protagonist of The Crow Road. I was drawn to his easy going, sometimes humorous narration as he returns home and tries to piece together clues from the past. The dark academic setting of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History also played on my mind.  
 

We’re coming to the end of 2025, so we’re asking what has been your favourite Scottish book you’ve read this year? 
 
That’s a really hard question as I have read so many great Scottish books this year! I think it would have to be Ootlin by Jenni Fagan, which is beautifully written and incredibly moving. I raced through it. I also really enjoyed One Came Back by Rose McDonagh and Idle Grounds by Krystelle Bamford. 

 

Bluff by Francine Toon is published by Transworld, priced £16.99.

Alistair Moffat mixes history and travelogue in his latest book, The North Sea. In this extract he travels to the Bell Rock to investigate the story of the Stevenson lighthouse that dominates the skyline.

 

The North Sea: Along the Edge of Britain
By Alistair Moffat
Published by Canongate

 

Seven years after Robert Stevenson had surveyed the Bell Rock, the Commissioners of the Board of Northern Lights were at last persuaded that a lighthouse should be built on it. But not by Stevenson. John Rennie had designed and overseen the construction of canals and aqueducts as well as taking a leading role in drainage schemes in the Fens. At Kelso, my hometown, he was responsible for a beautiful bridge over the Tweed that has stood many tests of time. Rennie’s insistence that its piers should be sunk more than two metres into the bedrock below the river, the diggers protected by coffer dams, made the structure immensely strong and durable. It was the model for London’s Waterloo Bridge.  

Economic arguments were also persuasive for the Commissioners. In the second half of the eighteenth century victorious campaigns against the French in Canada and India had given Britain a vast and potentially very lucrative empire. Merchant shipping was the only means of bringing raw materials to the mills and factories of an industrialising British economy, and far too many cargoes and men were being lost at sea. A light on the Bell Rock would also greatly enhance the developing economy of Dundee. Raw flax for the city’s linen mills was being imported from Russia and the Baltic, while commercial whaling had begun in the 1750s. These valuable cargoes needed safe access to the mouth of the Tay. 

 

* 

On 16 August 1807, with a rousing send-off from Arbroath harbour, the first work party sailed out to the Bell Rock. Their immediate task was to clear it of seaweed and the melancholy litter left by shipwrecks. The plan was to build barracks so that workers did not have to be ferried back and forth from the shore or spend periods of high tide on board the lighthouse ship, and footings  had to be prepared for the cast-iron skeleton of the structure. Most important was the digging of the wide foundation pit for the base of the lighthouse. Hacked out of the rock with picks, pinches and chisels (which needed constant maintenance from blacksmiths), the pit needed to be perfectly flat and perfectly circular. Sixty centimetres deep, it would hold the first two courses of granite in place, and eventually the whole lighthouse, planted like a post in a posthole.  

It was wet, slippery and dangerous work – and at one point almost fatal. On one autumn day the lighthouse ship broke away from its moorings and left Stevenson and his work party of thirty-two men stranded on the rock. The tide was rising as they watched the ship drift further and further away, and disaster loomed. It was only a matter of time before the incoming tide engulfed them. There were two small boats used to transfer materials from the ship, but they could only take a few of the men. Stevenson later recalled:  

‘Not a word was uttered by any one, but all appeared to be silently calculating their numbers . . . The workmen looked steadfastly upon the writer [Stevenson] and turned occasionally towards the vessel, still far to leeward. All this passed in the most perfect silence, and the melancholy solemnity of the group made an impression never to be effaced from the mind.’  

But then good fortune suddenly intervened. One of the men thought he could make out a boat on the horizon, sailing out towards them from Arbroath. It was a supply vessel bringing letters – and salvation. 

 

Landing granite blocks on the rock that weighed a ton, with nothing but simple, hand-winched cranes and muscle power, was proving very difficult, and as he did throughout the life of the project, Robert Stevenson had to be inventive, find a better way of doing things. To get the stones from the safe landing place to the foundation pit, he had a short railway built and a small bogey adapted which the workers could push. It was vital to move these blocks very carefully, without chipping them in any way. Their shape, carved by the masons in the Arbroath work yard, was crucial to the strength and the durability of the lighthouse. What, in essence, Stevenson had designed was a huge three-dimensional jigsaw, and it had to fit together perfectly to form strong foundations and the walls of the tower that would rise from them. 

At the work yard in Arbroath wooden moulds were made and fitted together in what was both a trial run and a guide for the masons. Each stone was carved like a jigsaw piece that would fit only into the stones next to it. The blocks of granite forming each course would link together in a circular pattern with a curved outer face before tapering inwards in sinuous lines to where they were butted against the stones next to them so that they interlocked with them, and only them. When the first course had been laid and found to be perfectly level, the second was locked on to it using two techniques. Set at random intervals, joggles were small knobs, protuberances on the bottom of each stone that fitted snugly into exactly matching notches in the one below it. The second  means of locking the courses together was to have two holes bored right through a stone and then part of the way through the stone below it. Oak rods known as trenails were then inserted and pushed down until their top ends were flush with the new stone’s upper surface. The ends were then split and wedges driven in to make the trenails as tight as possible. Pozzolana, what the masons called Roman cement, was used to point the seams between the stones. It would set in the wet. All of this very precise and strenuous work was done at speed in the two hours of low tide and with little more than muscle power and determination to make the stones fit. And they did fit, perfectly, giving the tower the immense strength it would need when gales blew in and mighty waves battered its walls.  

At the end of March 1808 Robert Stevenson sailed out to the Bell Rock to see what damage the winter’s storms had done to the foundation courses. To his immense relief, not one stone had moved, the jigsaw had stayed in place, the design and all the care taken over the carving had proved itself. That summer the pace of construction quickened. Not only were the barracks completed, housing eleven men and Stevenson himself, but as one course was laid upon another, rising up out of the incoming tide, work could go on a little longer each day. By the end of August 1809 the lighthouse tower was nine metres high, its sheer weight also adding significantly to its strength. By June 1810 the first internal floor had been laid, where the entrance door now is. At the end of August all that remained was the difficult and delicate business of placing the lantern on top of the  tower, the whole point and purpose of all that effort, skill and ingenuity. 

In February 1811 the Bell Rock light flared for the first time, and since then it has only been extinguished in wartime. Waves thirty-five metres higher than the top of the lantern are whipped up by gales, but none of these mighty storms has made any impression. And nor could the Luftwaffe. Three times in 1940 and 1941 the lighthouse was strafed by machine-gun fire, and on 1 April 1941 a bomb was dropped. It exploded about ten metres from the base of the tower, but it didn’t cause any damage. The Bell Rock light can be seen for thirty kilometres out to sea as its beam rakes over the waves. And almost as much of a comfort, it can also be seen fifty-six kilometres inland, a reassurance for those who waited at home for the safe return of fishermen and sailors. 

 When the Ultimate Predator circled slowly around the lighthouse, the engines quiet and the passengers all standing on one side, the effect was almost hypnotic. Like others, I stared at the white tower as the sun made it brilliant. Awesome is now a threadbare adjective, but that is how it seemed to me; awe is what I felt, a belly-hollowing sense of awe at this elegant, powerful testament not only to hard, dangerous work and ingenuity but also to selflessness. The Bell Rock was built to save lives, and Robert Stevenson patented none of his inventions nor guarded any of the secrets of his methods so that others could use them elsewhere. More lights needed to be built, more lives saved. 

As we sailed away, back to safe harbour, from this structure that had no business being there, standing sentinel in the midst of the sea for more than 200 years, I knew that I had been privileged to see one of the wonders of the modern world. 

 

The North Sea: Along the Edge of Britain by Alistair Moffat is published by Canongate, priced £20.00.

The Little Book of Christmas and Hogmanay is the perfect stocking filler gift, but we’d also urge you to read it ahead of the festive season too to get some brilliant hints and tips about making your own celebrations that little bit more special. Here we include two seasonal recipes and poems for you to enjoy.

 

The Little Book of Christmas and Hogmanay
By Anna Marshall
Published by Birlinn

 

Whipkull

Whipkull (or whipkül) is Shetland’s answer to eggnog. The drink is thought to originate in Scandinavia and is traditionally made with cream, eggs, nutmeg and rum. People have also been known to substitute the rum for whisky. It is drunk at the end of a Yule feast and sometimes even as a breakfast drink on New Year’s Day.

INGREDIENTS

12 egg yolks
200g caster sugar
8 tbsp rum or whisky
350ml double cream
1 tsp nutmeg

METHOD

1. Whisk together the egg yolks, sugar and rum.
2. Add the cream.
3. Pour the whipkull into glasses and dust with nutmeg.

 

 

How I’ll Decorate My Tree

It was still very far from Christmas
when my mamma said to me:
tell me, Precious, what you going to hang
on our Christmas tree?

I said: the fairy-lights that Dad just fixed
and . . . jewel-coloured jelly-beans from the
pick’n’mix –

oh, and from it I’ll dangle tinsel in tangles,
sparkles, sequins and spangles,
a round golden coin (chocolate money),
that cracker joke that was actually funny,
my rosary beads – and a plastic rose
as red as Rudolph Reindeer’s nose,
the gnome that grows the tangerines,
the picture of me with my tambourine,
and (this is Mum’s favourite, she says)
the photo of all of us in our PJ’s!
The Ladybird book that Lola lent me,
the blue butterfly bracelet that Brittany sent me,
the ear-ring I lost,
a pop-up Jack Frost,
a space-hopper, an everlasting gobstopper,
a pink-eyed sugar mouse,
the keys to my grandfather’s house,
a tiny pair of trainers with silver laces,
and – now my smile is straight – gonna hang up my
braces!

A marble, an angel-scrap, a star,
the very last sweetie out my advent calendar,
a kiss under the mistletoe,
a mitten still cracked with a crunch and a creak of
snow,
that glitter scarf I finally got sick of,
a spoon with cake-mix still to lick off,
the Dove of Peace that our Darren made,
some green thoughts in our tree’s green shade –
I’ll hang up every evergreen memory
of moments as melted and gone
as that candle that was supposed to smell
of cinnamon –
memories big as a house and as small’s
the baubles I used to call ball-balls.

With pleasure I’ll treasure them
then, on proper Christmas Day, I’ll show them all to
you
between the Queen’s Speech and Doctor Who.

Liz Lochhead

 

 

Black Bun

Black bun was supposedly the original Twelfth Night cake eaten in Scotland, before it became known as ‘Scotch Christmas Bun’ during the first half of the nineteenth century. It was traditionally a spiced fruit mixture encased in bread dough, but the dough gradually gave way to a lighter shortcrust pastry case and the name became simply black bun.

Serves 12–16

INGREDIENTS

For the pastry:

280g plain flour
½ tsp baking powder
grated zest and juice of
1 lemon
150g unsalted butter, diced
3–4 tbsp cold water
1medium egg, beaten to glaze

For the filling:

450g raisins
600g currants
100g whole almonds, roughly chopped
50g walnuts, roughly chopped
150g plain flour
75g caster or demerara sugar
1 tsp ground allspice
1 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp ground cinnamon
½ tsp cream of tartar
½ tsp baking powder
2 tbsp whisky
4 tbsp (approx.) milk

METHOD

1. For the pastry, sift the flour and baking powder into a bowl, then stir in the lemon zest. Rub in the butter, then add the lemon juice and 3–4 tbsp cold water – enough to bind to a stiff dough.
2. Turn out onto a lightly floured board and roll out thinly. Use two-thirds of the pastry to line a buttered, square 23cm/9in cake tin. Roll out the remaining pastry to fit as a lid, cover and chill both the lid and the case for half an hour or so.
3. Preheat the oven to 140°C/275°F/Gas 1.
4. For the filling, mix everything together, except the whisky and milk. (I do this with my hands – it is easier.) Now add the whisky, and enough milk to moisten the mixture. Turn into the pastry case and press down well.
5. Dampen the edges of the pastry all round with a little water and place the rolled-out pastry lid on top. Press together the edges to seal, then cut off any remaining pastry. Prick all over with a fork. Using a very thin skewer, prick right through to the base of the tin: 6–8 pricks altogether. Brush the surface with some beaten egg, retaining a little for later.
6. Bake for 2–2½ hours until golden brown on top, reglazing with the remaining beaten egg after 1 hour of baking.
7. Cool in the tin for at least 2 hours, then carefully decant onto a wire rack to cool completely. Wrap in foil and store in an airtight container for at least 1month – and for anything up to 3–4months.

 

Open the Door

Open the door for the auld year
It is the pairtin-time:
Open the door for the new year
And lat the bairn win hame.

Bundle your winter’d joy and grief
On the back of the year that’s düne:
Open your hert for the new life
And lat the bairn come in.

William Soutar

 

The Little Book of Christmas and Hogmanay by Anna Marshall is published by Birlinn, priced £9.99.

Edinburgh’s Charco Press brings readers the best in Latin American fiction, but their latest book sees editor Carolina Orloff compile essays on feminism across the continent. We asked her to tell us why this project is so important to her and Charco Press.

 

La Lucha: Latin American Feminisms Today
Edited by Carolina Orloff
Published by Charco Press

 

What is the genesis of La Lucha? Why did you want to put this book together?

La Lucha comes from an intense desire that is the same one that gave birth to Charco: an urgent need to give visibility to Latin American voices and Latin American realities in the English-speaking world, which tends to be dominated by a mindset that, generally speaking, shies away from all-things translated, in the broadest sense of the term translation.

In recent years, women in Latin America have been leading profound social and political transformations, advancing feminist movements and human rights struggles in ways that are often unprecedented globally. As a woman living in the UK, where the realities of gender equality and social activism are very different, I felt it was essential for La Lucha to exist, and for people to access the experiences of these authors, activists and intellectuals. The book brings these voices and experiences to an international audience, offering insights into the courage, creativity, and resilience of Latin American women who are reshaping society, and inspiring readers beyond the region to engage with these vital struggles.

And Carolina writes in the Preface:

Feminism is ubiquitous (and so it should be) but not all feminisms are everywhere. This anthology arrives as both rupture and bridge: Latin American voices cross over not as guests, not as footnotes, but as protagonists in a global struggle for meaning and justice, where too often only a few feminisms are allowed to speak for the world. The pieces here collated are more than text: they are the catalysts of political consciousness, resistance, and transformation, taking place in a region which is generally neglected in the international weaving of idea formation. While bringing together a wide array of voices, this collection does not aim to smooth out or iron them into harmony; quite the opposite, it wants to celebrate and disseminate their differences, frictions, contradictions – their disobedient brilliance.

La Lucha, the title of this collection, expresses the powerful junction of feminist voices from Latin America. It is the noun in Spanish for fight, battle, confrontation. It is also the conscious action of resistance, the active representation of rage: an empowering sentiment running through the visions for change that bring these texts together. A fury that expands with and through the cultural complexities of a region marked by colonialism, social injustice, neglect, patriarchy. It is a common root igniting the women of Latin America to speak and fight for a life in dignity, for the acknowledgement of women’s rights, voices, bodies, actions, perspectives, desires, practices.

Rooted in testimony, reflection, and defiance, these texts do not represent a cultured invitation to ‘diversify’ the canon. Rather, they are a call to reorient the script, to deepen and widen the lenses through which feminist action – both everyday and revolutionary, intimate and historical – is understood and enacted. The aim is not to discard European or Anglo feminisms, but to decentre them, to demand recognition in a global arena of feminisms still unreflective of the plurality of streams that make up its political force, to leave a mark.

La Lucha wants to look at patriarchy in the eye, unravelling the literary and social fabrics of feminism through varied and deep-rooted genealogies – of land, labour, care, defiance, death, and resistance. In so doing, it rejects the quiet violence of absence and the polished coherence of singular narratives. From land-rights movements to city streets, from communal life to the solitude of resistance in the barrio, the ideas collected here create a shared space where contradiction need not collapse into confusion, and solidarity is not simplification

Latin American feminism is not a singular river but a constellation of moving, breathing, life-bearing currents. As such, what this anthology wants to offer is not curated harmony but rather a gathering of tensions: Indigenous, Black, queer, migrant, working-class, academic, literary, insurgent.

La Lucha aims to represent the struggle for life itself, for a new politics of care and self-determination. In a world still shaped by colonial and linguistic hierarchies, this book builds a politically diverse, horizontal space. In La Lucha, heterogeneity is not a challenge to be fixed via universalizing codes of conduct or understanding: it offers no artificial consensus, but instead opens a space for the mindful interplay of tension and convergence, solidarity and difference; elements that give rise to a still-unwoven landscape of feminist political imagination from Latin America.

 

La Lucha: Latin American Feminisms Today, edited by Carolina Orloff is published by Charco Press, priced £14.99.

In 2022, Christina Riley became an ‘underwater artist in residence’ at the Argyll Coast Hope Spot, and the essays she wrote about her time there have been collected in this wonderful book. In this extract she talks about sharing the wonder of the natural world.

 

Looking Down at the Stars: Life Beneath the Waves
By Christina Riley
Published by Saraband

 

The coast toys with the senses. Some days it is striking in its stillness and silence. On others, the wind tears away the calls of gulls and crashing waves. Around midsummer, my usually beloved seaweed made me gag as it rotted in the stagnant heat. When the tide was especially low, I could walk far out onto the intertidal rock pools and feel the barnacles jag into the soles of my feet or, while kneeling to stare at a hermit crab, deep into my knees. The pain rose almost imperceptibly until suddenly it was searing, but the crab was surely about to move again … so, just bear it a little bit longer. Back on the sand, some pebbles were so sea polished they gleamed like glass, calling out to be rolled around in the palm. Like the tiny patch of tiny shells, there was a particular spot to find, and sit amongst, these perfectly polished pebbles (how they were all carried to the same area is a mystery to me). Handling the cool stone on a hot day, the beach came to inhabit more of my body, increasing my physical sensitivity to a shifting landscape which always, with every visit, without fail, provided something new to feel. To sit down, staring at the sea, holding something like comfort in the palm of my hand, felt like a valuable way to spend my time. These days spent feeling the beach acutely made it appear all the fuller to my heightened senses and quietening mind. Each day added a layer that compressed and solidified my love for this coast and for others. It matters how we experience the coast. It matters what we take away from it in our minds, in our hands and in our pockets. It matters that we tread lightly but feel fully.  

Emptying my pockets at home, I’d shuffle them around on the floor in some kind of flat lay and, inevitably, a pattern would form in the swirling symmetries or the tilting of a whelk, or a periwinkle would spill light into its concave. Empty shells, stilled lives. Gathered, they seemed to spell out whatever it was I didn’t have the energy or clarity to say with words. The all-encompassing sea begs for a physical, three-dimensional experience, something I had the privilege of feeling every single day. Yet some of the most intimate moments of this beach diary occurred on social media. Each night, I posted a photograph of the day’s arrangement to Twitter, for no particular reason other than it was the most accessible and simplest way of sharing them, which I suppose I felt a desire to do. But I worried that the speed of social media would somehow wash the beauty away from such tactile artefacts, trivialising an intimate moment by squeezing it into a chaotic and two-dimensional one. The tenacity of Twitter didn’t feel in sync with my experience on the shore. These objects lured me in by the way they caught the light, by their curved surfaces or the way the colours shifted as they turned in my hand. Twitter didn’t feel like a place to express love, be it for a person or a place. But in those early days of lockdown, Twitter became an intensely sensitised realm. Our emotions had nowhere else to go. And as it turned out, I gained as much joy, beauty and—perhaps most importantly in spring 2020—connection online as I did by the sea.  

Eventually, these daily tweets formed a book, The Beach Today. A scrapbook of sorts, or a diary, attempting to tell the story of the coast at a time when words failed. How could I describe every contour of a shell, or the soft chalk that transfers onto my salt-dried and cracked skin when rolled between my fingertips? The photograph acted as the memory, or souvenir. The means of saying, “Wow, would you look at this?”  

This makes me think about who gets to tell what story, and how words fail me when the subject is of the underwater realm. It isn’t for me to say how a whelk, or the kelp, lives their life, or how they feel. If we write what we know, then there’s nothing I can contribute when it comes to the unknowable sea. It’s a lesson in what needs to be said and what’s best left unsaid, and in imparting stories onto a place that isn’t my domain. Anything I write about the sea can only come from the perspective of land, and never will I be able to write truthfully about the way an octopus understands coralline algae enough to camouflage itself against its purple encrustations, despite being unable to see colour itself. Or perhaps they can, I may never know. How could I ever write about an octopus other than to tell you how it makes me feel to live on earth at the same time as that octopus? To tell you that the octopus, that all of it, is miraculous?  

It’s important to love what we don’t understand. 

We thought we understood whales enough to execute horrors onto them. We thought fish were inexhaustible. One of the (many) difficulties of the pandemic has been grasping the idea of doing nothing as a means of doing something. What’s the difference between walking a mile on a beach, or taking that same time to sit down on it? Not moving an inch but exploring each shell within your arm’s reach? What would be gained by doing less? Would it, in fact, be more? What is “less” and “more,” anyway?  

In More About Wild Nature, Eliza Brightwen sums up at least one reason why we attempt to share a place, whether it’s through language, photographs, or collecting objects, contemplating this innate desire we have to show others the beauty we’ve witnessed ourselves. She explains that even if the task of describing a sunset to one who hasn’t seen it appears feeble, it’s worth trying nonetheless:  

“The friend will be able to conjure up from your description not perhaps the sunset you saw, but something bright and beautiful that will bring refreshment to a mind possibly very wearied with the monotony of everyday life. Sweeter still will be to her the thought that, whilst nature was giving you such exquisite pleasure, you received only that you might bestow, you took thought and pains that she might be the sharer of your joy.”  

To say, “I want you to see this” for no reason other than the belief that it will bring pleasure or joy is always worthwhile. By photographing these beach collections and posting those photos online, inanimate objects gave rise to human connection, a shared looking at the sea. An encrusted clam shell its own seascape, something to point to and say, ‘What do you think of this?’ There is no right or wrong answer. There is also a commitment made when you choose a place (or perhaps it chooses you) and share it with others. To look at a beach with slow and meticulous wonder is to see it for everything that it is: tangled weed and wires, periwinkles and plastic, sea and smashed glass. Not all of our seaside experiences are pleasurable, and the more we get to know a place, the more we understand that it is often as much a story of loss as of abundance. But it is in the face of loss we need to be looking, collecting, and sharing that which we love, that which we don’t want to lose. 

 

Looking Down at the Stars: Life Beneath the Waves by Christina Riley is published by Saraband, priced £12.99.

The Barrowland Ballroom has long been a cornerstone of the live music scene, embodying Glasgow’s identity for decades. Alison Irvine offers readers a brilliant cultural history of the venue, and here she tells BooksfromScotland her own favourite memories.

 

Barrowland: The Inside Story of Glasgow’s Beloved Ballroom
By Alison Irvine
Published by Luath Press

 

Imagine having an Access All Areas pass to one of the greatest music venues in the world: the Barrowland Ballroom. Imagine on quiet days being allowed to stand on the empty Maplewood dance floor or peek into the main band dressing room with its iconic stars above the mirrors. Imagine, on gig nights, standing at the back of the hall and watching a crowd go wild as a band returns to the stage for its encore.

That’s been my experience at the Barrowland Ballroom for several years while researching my book and I have loved every minute of my time there. For my research, I spoke with Barrowland staff, gig-goers and musicians and all of them talked about the chemistry created between artists and audiences and the shared experience of being at a Barrowland gig. Staff expressed pride at working in such a beloved venue and of playing a part in making a gig-goer’s experience extra special.

I wanted to capture as many stories and memories as I could about the Barrowland Ballroom and in, doing so, I observed staff at their work, spoke to gig-goers and was witness to many wee details that make up the Barrowland experience. Here are some of my favourite moments:

 

Working a shift behind the bar

Pints, half-pints, gin, vodka, cider, alcohol-free: I served it all alongside the famous Barrowland bar staff. These colleagues of mine worked hard. From the moment security staff called ‘doors’ and the first gig-goers entered the hall, the Barrowland bar was busy. Yes, there were lulls, when we could look over the tops of heads to the musicians on the stage – in my case, I saw Lucy Dacus play – but mostly we had our heads down and kept serving. I loved it. My favourite moments were witnessing the legendary Barrowland chant: ‘Here we… Here we… Here we f**king go’ and seeing everyone in the crowd lit up in golden light with their arms in the air. It was an extraordinary sight.

 

Observing the world-famous Glasgow crew

The crew that loads in bands equipment prides itself on being the most hardworking and reliable in the world. This is primarily because there is no lift at Barrowland and there are several flights of stairs to climb to get to the ballroom. There is a hoist for really heavy pieces of equipment but everything else is carried up the stairs and carried down again at the end of the night. I saw these guys empty the contents of two artic lorries at seven-thirty in the morning. Amps, crates, lights, monitors, they all went up the Barrowland stairs. The crew sang and joked and sweated and smoked and they got the job done.

Checking in coats in the cloakroom

This was fun. I was there at the start of the evening when I could sense the excitement everyone had for their night ahead. I greeted people as they walked along the red-railed pens and checked in their coats, bags and umbrellas. I chatted to customers, wished them a good night, and had some fascinating chats with staff members as they came in to say hi during the gig. I can’t tell you how many times I glimpsed men coming into the cloakroom then turning on their heels and exiting because they’d mistaken it for the gents’ toilets next door!

 

Watching a gig from the control room

A gig in miniature. In Rock Steady’s office on the floor below the ballroom there are TV screens showing pictures from inside the Barrowland Ballroom. One night, I saw silent black and white images of a Bear’s Den gig. I wouldn’t have known there was a gig on upstairs were it not for the sound of people’s feet stomping on the ceiling above us. That night the band wanted to play an acoustic number in the middle of the dance floor and the security staff had to ensure that everyone was ready for the musicians’ walk from the stage into the crowd. It went without a hitch.

 

Seeing my friend play with The Pogues

I watched from the crowd, notepad and Dictaphone put aside, as I experienced The Pogues and their guests play a recent Barrowland gig. Sweat, beer, heat and joy is what I remember most, as well as pride at seeing a pal of mine up on the stage. She is in a folk band called Stick in the Wheel which not only supported The Pogues but joined them on stage during the gig. I asked her afterwards what it was like. ‘Amazing,’ she said. It looked amazing from where I stood too. She and The Pogues seemed like they were having the time of their lives and I can assure you that I was too – along with the other 1900 people in the crowd that night. Another Barrowland shared experience.

 

I’ll miss my AAA access to the Barrowland Ballroom, but I’ll be back, there’s no doubt, happy to be a punter again.

 

Barrowland: The Inside Story of Glasgow’s Beloved Ballroom by Alison Irvine is published by Luath Press, priced £20.

Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill of Simple Minds have just released their autobiography and collaborated with music writer Graeme Thomson to put their story together. BooksfromScotland got in touch with Graeme Thomson to talk about the project.

 

Our Secrets are the Same: Friendship & Fame at the Heart of Simple Minds
By Jim Kerr & Charlie Burchill with Graeme Thomson
Published by Constable

 

What can you tell us about your latest book, and collaboration, Our Secrets Are the Same? How did this opportunity come to you? 

 The book is the joint memoir of Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill, the founding members of Simple Minds and for the longest time now the sole original members still in the band. In it, of course, they reflect on the highs and lows of their near-50 year career in perhaps Scotland’s most successful ever group, but it is also a book about their even longer friendship, which began in 1967, when they were eight years old and their families moved from the Old World tenements of Southside Glasgow to a New World high rise housing estate in Toryglen. It’s a book about music, fame, ambition and creativity, but also about enduring male friendship, family, place and codes of behaviour, spoken and unspoken.  

 In 2020, I wrote a book about the earlier years of Simple Minds called Themes For Great Cities. I interviewed all of the original band, including Jim and Charlie, who I already knew a little. After the book came out and was well received, I was involved in a few more Simple Minds related pieces of work, including being a consultant on Joss Crowley’s documentary, Everything In Possible, and interviewing Jim and Charlie off camera for a Sky Arts show where they performed all of their classic album, New Gold Dream, at Paisley Abbey. It was on that day, in October 2022, in a little room upstairs at the Abbey, that Jim and Simple Minds’ manager Ian Grenfell mentioned the idea of joint memoir with Charlie, and asked whether I would like to collaborate with them on it. I thought it was a really very interesting idea, and a potentially fascinating route into something a little more expansive and relatable than the standard ‘rock memoir’. And so it proved.  

  

You’ve written about Simple Minds before in Themes for Great Cities, but the approach for this book must’ve been completely different. Can you tell us about how you worked with Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill, and how you agreed on how the book is formatted? Who chose the quotes that open each chapter? 

Themes For Great Cities was very much my personal take on the music of Simple Minds, and a bunch of records that meant a lot to me. I had a lot of things that I had wanted to say about that music for a long time, and also about what you might call the Platonic ideal of a band operating as a collective creative democracy, an approach which I thought was exemplified by Simple Minds in its early years.  

Whereas Our Secrets Are The Same is Jim and Charlie’s personal story. It was absolutely driven by their memories, insights, opinions, input, ideas – and their words. 

It is very much a collaboration. Jim in particular had a lot of his own written material that he shared with me in batches, some of which made it directly into the book, some of which I used as basis for sections, and all of which helped shape the tone and the themes of the book. Over and above that, in the autumn of 2024 I interviewed both Jim and Charlie separately around a dozen times for, I would estimate, around 25 hours each in total. Some of that was done in person, some of it was done via Zoom. We were already quite comfortable with each other, and we had lunch at Jim’s house in Glasgow shortly before we embarked on the interviews just to catch up and settle on how we would proceed.  

After the interviews were done, and using all that material as well as Jim’s writings, I worked on drafts and shared them with Jim and Charlie. They came back with comments, annotations, suggestions, re-wordings and so forth. They were very closely involved and fully ‘in’. The book would never have happened without their commitment to making it as good and as true as it could be. Simple Minds were heading off on a five-month world tour in March 2025, which was a good deadline. By then the text was in pretty good shape, but we kept in contact via email and phone during the early parts of the tour to finalise the manuscript.  

The structure of the book, with each chapter opening with a first person, present tense vignette leading to a more in-depth passage on a particular theme, time or event, was, I think, my idea. I had in my head the idea that the opening salvo of each chapter could be regarded as similar to the ‘intro’ of a song: a hook, a riff, a snatch of the chorus, here and there a longer motif. These were intended to bring the reader into the action very quickly, and then the ‘song’, or the chapter, opens out from there. I also fought hard to have Jim and Charlie’s voice in different fonts! I think it is key to helping the reader slip between the two narratives.  

The idea of having quotes as epigraphs opening each chapter came directly from Jim’s notes, which as well as his own writing included lots of quotes from many sources – classical texts, all kinds of literature, travel writing, pop culture, films and TV shows – which meant something meaningful to him. We ended up using some of these in the book and I sourced more that felt relevant to particular chapters. Frustratingly, there were a couple that had to be changed quite late in the day because we didn’t get the necessary permissions in time. Again, the quotes Jim sent were incredibly helpful for me to get a sense of the things that might be important to write about in the book.  

  

Did working on this book make you feel differently about your previous book? 

I don’t think so. In some ways I see the two as complementary. I think we were all in agreement that we wanted this book to touch on topics and say things that Jim and Charlie hadn’t necessarily said publicly – or even privately! – before. Obviously, we wanted to shine a light on the music they have made together, but doing so without getting overly bogged down in the detail of making every Simple Minds album. They have been doing interviews for almost half a century, and there is a lot of material already out there where they talk about the minutiae of making Simple Minds records, not least in Themes For Great Cities. So this was about going deeper and wider than Simple Minds in terms of really trying to understand them as two very different and quite complex people; to get a sense of where they came from and what shaped them, and in turn show how that has impacted upon all the wonderful music they have made through the years, and the ways in which they have managed to keep the band going through thick and thin. 

  

Did it make you feel differently towards the music? 

I have been listening to Simple Minds for more than 40 years and have already written at length about them, so my feelings about their music are fairly well set! However, I may in the past have been slightly dismissive of some later Simple Minds material. Spending quite a lot of time in the book reflecting on the period from the mid-nineties to mid-00s, when things were quite tricky for the band, allowed me an opportunity to go back and reassess the output from that time more objectively. Knowing what I know now about what was happening in their lives and the life of the band, I can appreciate more aspects from all eras of Simple Minds, I think, and the sheer variety of music they have made.  

  

This book focuses just as much on relationships as the work they’ve produced together. What have you discovered about friendship and family in this collaboration? 

Jim and Charlie’s enduring friendship is so much about being on the same page in terms of the fundamentals, the kind of basics that don’t need to be articulated. Shared values, shared experiences, shared codes. I think they would both say having that kind of shorthand has made both their friendship and creative partnership so much easier, and incredibly solid, even though they are very different personalities. And that really comes from the fact that they grew up in the same area, with supportive parents who instilled the same values in them. It has allowed them to act almost as one throughout Simple Minds, which at times has been incredibly helpful and at other times has meant they have lacked objectivity and have suffered from the absence of a more detached voice to offer different perspectives.  

There is also the fact that Jim is the oldest sibling in his family, and Charlie is the youngest in his. They both make the point that this has impacted the dynamic in their relationship: Jim tends to lead, Charlie is happy to follow… up to a point! It’s clear from writing the book that both Jim and Charlie have been very single-minded – they would even say ‘selfish’ – in prioritising Simple Minds throughout their lives. But Charlie in particular is incredibly tenacious. His refusal to deviate from the course of keeping Simple Minds going, or to even contemplate its failure, has proved crucial to the band’s survival.  

  

What do you think is their abiding feelings for Scotland now, for Glasgow? 

They are very proud Scots and even prouder Glaswegians, without being sentimental about it. Jim still has a home in Glasgow and a place in Perthshire, not too far from where Simple Minds built their own studio in the late 1980s and 1990s. He enjoys spending time here. I recently did an event with them in the Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh, a relatively intimate gig for them! They were really delighted to feel the warmth of the Scottish audience so close at hand. There is, I suppose, a similar form of shorthand between Simple Minds and its Scottish fanbase as there is between Jim and Charlie: so much shared history, cultural touchstones, humour, and love.  

They had appeared at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow the night before the event in Edinburgh. That was a real buzz for them as the Citz was a very important cultural hub for Jim and Charlie growing up as teenagers on the southside. So, these connections remain real and significant. They have retained many friendships from their schooldays and younger years. There is a great deal of affection and history stored up, but their lives nowadays are lived mostly far away from here. Charlie hasn’t lived in Scotland since the late eighties, and has subsequently lived in Italy, Ireland and Holland. Jim no longer has any close family in Glasgow, and his primary base for the past 25 years has been Sicily. Charlie has joined him there in recent years. They are both now Italian domiciled and speak the language very well.  

Perhaps this passage of the book, written by Jim, sums it up best: 

Charlie and I are formed completely from Glasgow granite. That will never change. But the granite has been shaped by so many other experiences and influences, going right back to the time of our first ever hitchhiking trip. The idea of being first Europeans, then internationalists, always held huge appeal to both of us. 

Outside of playing shows with Simple Minds, I return to Scotland regularly. I love to be in Scotland in August and September. It’s the perfect antidote to being on the road. I love the peace, the poetry, the nature and the history we have. But Sicily is home. We have it so good: the landscape, the culture, the weather, the food. Who wouldn’t want to eke out more summer months each year if they can? 

I realise now that my choices have been about more than simply chasing the sun. My nephew here in Taormina is Sicilian. My other nephew is a Frenchman. There is a strong Japanese influence in my life. I married an American and an Englishwoman. Mine has been an international existence; Charlie’s has been the same. That hunger we had as kids, that curiosity, never died – and it has shaped us. Yet some core part of us will always be quintessentially Glaswegian. I love the Glasgow spirit, that condensed mix of Irish and Scottish, and everything that comes out of it: the wit and grit and humour. The street-level surrealism. I love the ability to laugh through the tears – and, crucially, at yourself. 

 

Do you know what your next writing project will be? 

I am just finishing a book about Talk Talk which will be published next year. The start of that project actually predates the entire span of doing Our Secrets Are The Same, and I’m really delighted that it will soon see the light of day.  

 

Our Secrets are the Same: Friendship & Fame at the Heart of Simple Minds by Jim Kerr & Charlie Burchill with Graeme Thomson is published by Constable, priced £25.00.

Who says you have to go out to the wilds of the country to see Scotland’s fantastic wildlife? Not Keith Broomfield in his latest book, Wild Edinburgh, a guide to nature spotting in Scotland’s capital city. We asked him to name is five favourite spots in Edinburgh to spot wildlife.

 

Wild Edinburgh: An Illustrated Guide to the City’s Wildlife
By Keith Broomfield
Published by Tippermuir Books

 

1. Wardie Bay 

Bounded by Newhaven Harbour and Leith Docks to the east and Granton Pier on the western flank, Wardie Bay is rich in all kinds of wildlife. Look out for sea ducks such as goldeneye, eider and long-tailed duck in autumn and winter, whilst summer is often productive for spotting common and sandwich terns fishing for sprats and sandeels. At low spring tides, a treasure trove of rockpool creatures are waiting to be discovered, including fish such as shanny,  butterfish, and long-spined sea scorpion. By gently lifting large stones, fragile starfish-like brittlestars may be found, as well as green shore crabs and porcelain crabs – but always place the stones carefully back into their original position. 

1. Holyrood Park 

The jewel in the crown for Edinburgh’s wildlife, Holyrood Park and Arthur’s Seat is home to many scarce and unusual plants, mosses and lichens within its 260 hectares, which makes it a botanist’s dream. Rarities included sticky catchfly, which was the favourite flower of King James VI of Scotland and became the official floral emblem of the Scottish capital. The wealth of wildflowers means Holyrood Park is unusually prolific in butterflies – 26 species have been recorded, which is an impressive figure, given there are around 35 species in total found in Scotland. Among those that occur are northern brown argus, wall and grayling – all of which are classed as nationally rare. Other species include common blue, holly blue and small copper. 

1. Water of Leith 

Described as a ‘silver thread in a ribbon of green’, the 11 km stretch of the walkway from Colinton to Leith is diverse and enjoyable, mostly following a tranquil riverside path with occasional dips into city streets. Kingfishers, dippers, grey wagtails, goosanders, mallards, grey herons and moorhens can all be encountered, as well as elusive otters. The woodland at Colinton and Craiglockhart Dells are expansive, comprising a wide variety of trees, including ash, lime, elm, birch, willow and hawthorn, along with oak, yew, holly, hornbeam, sweet chestnut and beech. 

1. Corstorphine Hill 

The large woodland of Corstorphine Hill dominates the skyline of western Edinburgh, a rich ridge of verdant growth that runs from Clermiston to Ravelston. The hill is home to over 100 species of wildflower (including grasses), some of which are rare and unusual, including moschatel, climbing corydalis, little balsam and blue sow-thistle. The star attraction for wildlife enthusiasts is the healthy population of badgers, which are often glimpsed at dusk and dawn. One intriguing inhabitant of the woodland is the Natterer’s bat, a relatively scarce animal in Scotland. 

 

1. Newington and Warriston Cemeteries 

Founded in Victorian times, Newington and Warriston Cemeteries are both humbling and inspiring in equal measure, with each gravestone having a story to tell, often of young men cut down in their prime during the First and Second World Wars. These cemeteries are now wonderful natural mausoleums, particularly characterised by imposing trees, including large-leaved lime, common lime, horse chestnut, Norway maple, gean (wild cherry), laburnum, walnut, wych elm, hornbeam and ash. The trees and open glades attract many songbirds such as blackbirds, song thrushes, willow warblers and blackcaps, which in turn are preyed upon by sparrowhawks. Once the sun has set, the night shift moves into action, including tawny owls, foxes and badgers.  

 

Wild Edinburgh: An Illustrated Guide to the City’s Wildlife by Keith Broomfield is published by Tippermuir Books, priced £11.99.  

 

White Raven is an espionage thriller set in the Highlands at the early stages of the Cold War. BooksfromScotland caught up with author Maggie Ritchie to chat about its inspiration.

 

White Raven
By Maggie Ritchie
Published by Scotland Street Press

 

Hello Maggie, what can you tell our readers about your new novel, White Raven? 

Bored with her life as a teacher in an Edinburgh girls’ school, artist Rosie is on a painting holiday in Crail in the East Neuk of Fife when she recognises Alex Kuznetsov from her previous life as a decoder at Bletchley Park.  

Alex, a war hero and anti-Soviet intelligence officer, is in Crail to run a Russian language school for National Servicemen – the Cold War Joint Services School for Linguistics – to put Britain’s best and brightest young men through intensive training as translators and intelligence operators in the event of a third world war. 

During an ardent courtship, Rosie is recruited as an art teacher at the JSSL. She soon finds out that there is more to her role as she is persuaded to take on a daring undercover espionage mission in a Highland country house – and finds that what starts out as a thrilling game has deadly consequences. 

Inspired by the role Scottish women played in the Cold War during the 1950s, when the threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union was at its height, White Raven is a story of courage, resilience – and betrayal. 

  

White Raven moves from World War Two to the Cold War period. What is it that fascinates you about this period of time? 

The inspiration for this book was meeting 91-year-old Moira Beaty, one of the artists known as the Glasgow Girls. During the course of the newspaper interview, she showed me a sketch of a handsome young man – her Russian lover when she was 18. Moira told me about her astonishing early life as a code breaker at Bletchley Park during World War Two and her love affair with a British intelligence officer with Russian roots who started the anti-Soviet intelligence unit at Bletchley.  

I wanted to take the story on after the war. Bletchley Park, where class and gender were unimportant compared to your ability to break codes in a race against time against the Nazis – was a fascinating and liberating place for ordinary women like my heroine.  

Moira told me that her years at the Park were the best of her life. I wondered what it would be like for women like her years later, in the 1950s, when they were expected to settle down and never mention their ultra secret work, which saved thousands of lives and helped bring the war to an early close.  

My heroine, Rosie, who also worked at Bletchley Park during the war, relishes the thrills, intrigue and sense of once again playing a part on the world stage and having a cause to fight for when she enters the world of Cold War espionage. 

White Raven is set in 1956, when Scotland had a crucial, strategic role in the Cold War in the northern seas between the Americans and the Russians – and why it was chosen as a base for nuclear powered and armed submarines.  

I was intrigued when a TV director friend told me about an abandoned military base outside Crail in Fife, which in 1956 was the new home to the Cold War Joint Services School for Linguistics. The JSSL, also known as the School for Spies, put Britain’s best and brightest young men through intensive training as translators and intelligence operators in the event of a third world war.  

Famous graduates include writer Michael Frayn, writer and actor Alan Bennett, dramatist Dennis Potter, the former Royal National Theatre director Sir Peter Hall, and the former governor of the Bank of England Eddie George. They were taught fluent Russian by eccentric White Russian émigrés and Soviet defectors. The convicted Soviet spy Geoffrey Prime was also one of the 6,000 alumni.  

The school closed in 1960 with the ending of conscription, but you can still see the abandoned buildings on the former RNAS Crail (HMS Jackdaw) camp a few miles outside the village. 

 

Could you tell us about how you approach your research in writing historical fiction? 

As well as doing a huge amount of research in libraries, museums, art galleries, online and buying far too many books about the 1940s and 1950s, as well as memoirs and biographies of women spies and women who worked at Bletchley Park, I like to visit places where my books are set.  

For White Raven, they include fascinating Bletchley Park, Crail, a picturesque fishing village in the East Neuk of Fife, Edinburgh, where I used to live, Pool Ewe in the Highlands, and the dramatic tiny Aberdeenshire fishing village of Crovie, where my lovely artist friend Emma has a cottage. 

My most exotic research trip was to Shanghai, funded by a Society of Authors grant, for my previous book, Daisy Chain, which features some of the characters in White Raven, 20 years later. 

Where possible, I also interview people who have had similar experiences to my characters, like the artist Moira Beaty for White Raven. For previous novels I’ve interviewed my late parents and a retired missionary priest about their time in Africa in the early 1970s for my novel Looking for Evelyn, based on my childhood in Zambia, and a sculptor who works in marble for Paris Kiss, for my debut novel about Rodin and Camille Claudel. 

 

How do you balance the historical weight of your settings with the intimate story of your characters? 

Settings and period detail – the latter conveyed with a light touch – are hugely important for transporting the reader into another time and place. I strive as far as possible to get the facts right but I’m writing novels, not biographies or history books, so the characters and their emotions, thoughts and motivations, as well as a compelling plot are just as, if not more, important.  

I also think it’s important that we remember the amazing lives of people who came before us, their courage and the hardships and joys they experienced. It is said that travel broadens the mind, and I think that’s equally true of time travel. 

  

You often write about women and their rebellion against societal constraints. Is there anything you want to say about the contemporary world with these historical explorations? 

While women have come a long way, we are still held back by unequal pay and opportunities for advancement at work, sexism, sexual harassment, and too many women are subjected to violence and abuse, often in their own homes.  

The advances we do enjoy are relatively recent – my mother, who was a young woman in the 1950s – was not allowed to go to university despite excelling at school, her name didn’t go on the house deeds, and she was expected to give up work as soon as she had children. It was why she encouraged my sister and I to go to university. Equally, she was appalled at how we had to juggle work and inadequate childcare and be pulled in different directions. 

I like to explore how women over the ages have bravely resisted the constraints imposed on them, finding ways to express themselves and fulfil their ambitions while negotiating romantic love, marriage and the demands – and wonders – of motherhood.  

I’m constantly fascinated by artists in general and women artists in particular who, as well as struggling creatively, fight to be taken seriously alongside their male peers, only to be too often forgotten, like Camille Claudel and the artists known as the Glasgow Girls. 

 

If there was a film adaptation of White Raven – who do you see in the starring roles? 

Saoirse Ronan who has the intelligent sensitivity and nobody’s-fool wryness to play Rosie Anderson, and Jack Lowden, who has the right scowl and world-weary impatience he perfected in Slow Horses to play the Russian love interest and spy Alex Kuznetsov. It helps that they are both Celts with all the contradictions that brings, and that they are married, so their relationship will not come across as too saccharine and be tempered by Scottish/Irish humour and some eye rolling. 

 

As it’s coming up to the end of the year, could you tell us what your favourite books have been in 2025? 

I’m reading Andrew Miller’s latest, The Land in Winter, which I’m very much enjoying as a gentle, thoughtful contrast to a gruesome but intriguing Spanish police thriller, La Novia Gitana (The Gypsy Bride) by Carmen Mola. I recently read The Mitford Girls, a biography by Mary S Lovell.  I love Nancy Mitford’s books and it has made me want to re-read them for the umpteenth time.  

 

White Raven by Maggie Ritchie is published by Scotland Street Press, priced £16.99.

 

 

Reimaginings of the Lady Macbeth story have been a big trend recently at Sally O’ Reilly’s Hag Tale is an excellent addition. In this extract Wulva becomes aware that this legendary role is being created for her.

 

Hagtale
By Sally O’ Reilly
Published by Scribe Publications

 

Wulva hears that there is to be a great feast, to greet a new arrival. A mormaer from the north is coming with his men. They are to hunt boar, and there are to be celebrations. Such is the chaos and frenzied activity that for a while she is caught up in the preparations. But then Aefric takes her to one side. 

‘When our guest comes …’ She looks at Wulva, uncertain. ‘My lord Macduff has asked that you entertain our visitor. His wife died, not long ago.’ 

‘I shall do as my lord says.’ 

‘But yet — I don’t know.’ Aefric frowns. ‘You are so young. Be careful. Talk to him only in company. If anything disturbs you, come to me. You are our daughter, and only just a woman.’ 

‘Who is this guest? What is his name?’ 

‘Lord Macbeth,’ says Aefric. ‘A great warrior.’ She hesitates then lowers her voice. ‘My lord thinks very well of him as a soldier. But I do not admire him as a man. He is the sort that is never still, never satisfied. Even in the firelight, when there’s talk and laughter, you can see him looking outward, at the dark. He’s … greedy, hungry. Cruel. Even his love of hunting is greater than it should be. There are no more boar living in his country, which is why he has journeyed here.’ 

‘Are you afraid of him?’ 

Aefric takes her hands. ‘My child, there is only so much I can tell you. This is a matter of allegiance, and what will come I cannot say.’ Her voice drops to a whisper. ‘Be careful of him. Be guarded. And don’t repeat this. What I have said must go no further.’ 

Wulva goes to her chamber and closes the door. She thinks of the witches and their mission. Standing at the window, she watches the stormy clouds. Then she takes her finest clothes from the chest and lays them on the bed. A bodice trimmed with fur and silver thread, broadcloth skirts of deepest scarlet. 

He arrives, in the midst of other men. Glittering, blackhaired, wolf-pelts around his shoulders. His eyes are pale, and when their gaze meets, she feels a jerk, a shock. It’s you. She knows that face, she knows that scent. He bows his head, watching her intently. She feels his presence like a fever, cold and hot at the same time. The sickness presses down on her. Is this part of their spell? No good can come of this, she thinks, but she cannot tear her eyes away. 

Macduff calls her over; they talk of wars, of kings, and plans for battle. They talk of horses, plunder, areas for expansion. There is worthless land — mountains, chiefly — and land worth dying for. This is the land that may be fenced and ploughed and cultivated. Blood for food, food for blood. Macduff glances at her; she knows he wants her to say something to impress his guest, but the moment passes, and she remains dumb. This does not seem to matter. The talk shifts to the boar-hunt, and the plans for the following day. There’s a wide forest on the mountainside where boar are still plentiful. All the while, Macbeth is watching her, and there has never been a watching like it. She feels as if she is under the eye of Almighty God, or maybe the eye of Satan. Her body and her face are charged with a power beyond her understanding, and within that power she’s nothingness, a puff of sky. 

‘Why are you so quiet?’ he asks, the talk around them vanishing. 

‘Why should I speak?’ 

He touches her forehead. ‘There is much in here. I see it.’ She feels as if she is standing on the edge of a steep cliff, as if the drop is all around her, as if she dare not take a step. If there’s a task to do, an errand to run, she cannot name it. All there is in all Creation is this: a finger held out, touching her skin; beneath the skin, the bone. 

‘Wulva,’ he says, considering. ‘A curious sort of name. And you are a curious kind of creature, aren’t you? Not quite what you seem.’ 

And she thinks of what Cailleach said: You will know him when you see him. Likewise, he’ll know you. 

There is a storm brewing beyond the castle walls; the sky is reeling, and the three sisters are out there, riding the steep winds, making a pattern of what is yet to come, spinning cloud into frenzy. Sea-scapes mount into the night sky and crash down upon the splintered ships below. 

The down on her arms itches. She drinks a cup of wine, and he notes her every move. There is no escaping this; she cannot get away. White flesh in a red gown, heart beating like a drum. 

 

Hagtale by Sally O’ Reilly is published by Scribe Publications, priced £16.99.