Who says the adults should have all the reading fun on your holidays? Not us, and so we’ve gathered together a selection of the best YA titles to come from our favourite Scottish publishers this year. With action, laughs, heartache and adventure, there’s truly something for everyone here . . .
Sonny and Me by Ross Sayers (Cranachan Books)
With his latest novel that is genuinely laugh-out-loud funny and a brilliant, heartwarming portrayal of teen friendship, Ross Sayers has been gaining plaudits far and wide for his second YA book.
Daughter and Sonny are two best friends just trying to get through fourth year at high school without too many detentions. But when their favourite teacher leaves unexpectedly, and no one will say why, the boys decide to start their own investigation. As they dig deeper into the staff at Battlefield High, they discover a dark secret which one person will kill to protect…
If you like whip-smart dialogue, and unforgettable characters, then get your hands on a copy of Sonny and Me as soon as you can!
Summer Bird Blue by Akemi Dawn Bowman (Ink Road)
Akemi Dawn Bowman is an author to watch with a gift for writing books that provoke every kind of emotion.
Rumi Seto loves to play music with her younger sister, Lea, but when Lea dies in a car accident, and her mother sends her away to live with her aunt in Hawaii Rumi struggles to deal with those losses. With the help of the “boys next door”–a teenage surfer named Kai, and an eighty-year-old named George Watanabe, who succumbed to his own grief years ago, Rumi attempts to find her way back to her music, and to write the song she and Lea never had the chance to finish.
Aching, powerful, and unflinchingly honest, Summer Bird Blue explores big truths about insurmountable grief, unconditional love, and how to forgive even when it feels impossible. You might want to get your tissues out for this one.
Sea Change by Sylvia Hehir (Stirling Books)
Sylvia Hehir’s first YA novel is the winner of the Pitlochry Quaich from the Scottish Association of Writers, and was shortlisted for the Caledonia Novel Award in 2017.
Struggling to look after his grieving mother, sixteen-year-old Alex wants nothing more than to leave school. He makes friends with the mysterious Chuck, a stranger hiding out in this remote part of the Scottish Highlands. Then Chuck turns up dead next to Alex’s fishing boat. Were Chuck’s paranoid stories about men hunting him actually true? And is Alex facing even greater danger?
Hold on to your hats with this one; there’s thrills and spills in Sea Change from start to finish.
One Shot by Tanya Landman (Barrington Stoke)
Inspired by the life of the infamous Wild West sharpshooter, Annie Oakley, Tanya Landmann takes us back to 19th century America with this enthralling historical novel.
After the death of her beloved father, Maggie and her family are thrown into a life of destitution. Maggie tries to provide for her family the way her father always had – with his hunting rifle and whatever animals the forest would provide. But when her mother is confronted with her “unladylike” behaviour, Maggie is thrown into a life of unthinkable cruelty and abuse. With no one to care for her and only the hope of escape, all Maggie can do is survive.
A powerful and deeply moving coming-of-age drama unlike any other, and a glimpse into a time and place that has been much mythologised.
Girl in a Cage by Jane Yolen & Robert J Harris (Cranachan)
Staying with historical dramas, but with a setting closer to home, Jane Yolen and Robert J Harris bring to life a breathless chapter from Scottish history in this thrilling novel with an unforgettable young heroine.
When her father, Robert the Bruce, is crowned King of Scotland, Marjorie Bruce becomes a princess. But Edward Longshanks, the ruthless King of England, captures Marjorie and keeps her prisoner in a wooden cage in the centre of a town square, exposed to wind, rain, and the bullying taunts of the townspeople. Marjorie knows that despite her suffering and pain, she must stay strong: the future of Scotland depends on her…
Outcasts by Claire McFall (Kelpies Edge)
The million-selling Ferryman Trilogy comes to a brilliant, heart-stopping end with Outcasts, and fans can also take heart in knowing that a Hollywood movie deal has been secured too!
Tristan and Dylan have escaped death and conquered destiny. Finally, there is nothing to stop them from being together. But every action has a consequence, and their escape to the real world has caused an imbalance in the afterlife. It’s owed two souls — and it wants them back. When the world of the dead claims Dylan’s parents to restore the balance, Dylan and Tristan are offered a terrible bargain: stay together and condemn innocent souls to death, or return to the wasteland to take their place and face separation. Forever. With no place left for them in the world of the living or the dead, will Dylan and Tristan make a heartrending sacrifice?
Good Boy by Mal Peet (Barrington Stoke)
Powerful, unsettling and wholly original, if you’ve not already become a fan of Mal Peet, then you really must dig into your pockets for this one.
Sandie has been battling it since childhood: the hulking, snarling black dog of her nightmares. For years, her precious pet dog Rabbie has kept the monster at bay, but when he is no longer there to protect her, the black dog reappears to stalk Sandie in her sleep. . .
Illuminating the undeniable power of Mal Peet’s pared-back prose, Good Boy is an evocative examination of fear and anxiety that will leave you guessing long after its final page.
The Year After You by Nina de Pass (Ink Road)
If you’re a fan of stories with a boarding school setting, then you must pick this one up, as it offers that and more, giving us a story that packs a real emotional punch.
Up in the Alps, in a Swiss finishing school, Cara’s old life feels a million miles away. Nobody at Hope Hall knows her past, and the tragic death of her best friend, Georgina, and she intends to keep it that way. Yet, as much as she keeps her distance, her new friends break down the walls she has so carefully built up – especially the offbeat, straight-talking Hector, who understands how she feels better than anyone. But the closer Cara grows to Hector, she wonders, can she allow herself this second chance?
The Disconnect by Keren David (Barrington Stoke)
Hands up if you think you spend too much time on your mobile phone? If you agreed, then you might want to check out this novel from Keren David with its very topical and interesting premise . . .
Could you disconnect from your phone for six weeks? Six weeks without sharing photos, without group messages, without being kept in the social‑media loop? An eccentric entrepreneur has challenged Esther’s year group to do just that, and the winners will walk away with £1,000. For Esther, whose dad, sister and baby nephew live thousands of miles away in New York, the prize might be her only chance to afford flights for a visit … But can she really stay disconnected for long enough to win?
Black Snow Falling by LJ MacWhirter (Scotland Street Press)
If you’re a fan of fantasy writing, may we introduce the debut YA novel from LJ Macwhirter, a dark, medieval fairy tale that really pushes the boundaries of the imagination . . .
A girl with spirit is a threat and Ruth has secrets. An old book of heresy belonging to her long-absent father. A dream that haunts her. A love that she has to hide from the world. When she is robbed of all she holds true, her friends from Crowbury slide into terrible danger. Hope is as faint as a moonbow. Dare Ruth trust the shadowy one who could destroy them all?
Exploring themes of loss, hope and resilience Black Snow Falls is a novel full of enchantment, magic and adventure.
Following the publication of her new picture book, Finn the Little Seal, we got in touch with illustrator Sandra Klaassen to discuss sources of inspiration, characterisation, her illustration process, and the wild Scottish landscape.
Finn the Little Seal
By Sandra Klaasen
Published by Floris Books
Hi Sandra, thanks for speaking with us today. Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your career so far?
I was born and raised in The Netherlands, and for as long as I can remember I was always busy drawing. According to my mother, I wanted to become a children’s book illustrator from an early age. I would make up my own stories so I could make illustrations for them. My parents supported me in my choice. After graduating from The Royal Academy of Art, I managed to start working as an illustrator, and that was nearly thirty years ago.
Were there any artists or illustrators that really inspired you when you were starting out?
When I started out, I was inspired by several artists, especially at that time Quentin Blake, Tony Ross and William Steig. I was very impressed by their work. Another artist I was (and still am) inspired by is the Dutch illustrator Thé Tjong-Khing. I think his work is outstanding.
What’s your favourite thing about being an illustrator?
My favourite thing about being an illustrator is being inspired by every new story. I literally feel a sparkle inside every time. It’s so exciting to develop ideas for illustrations.
What sort of things do you most enjoy drawing?
I have a preference for illustrating very young children, nature, animals or fairy-like illustrations, but in particular I like to draw attention to emotions and sensitivity. I try to express this in poses and atmosphere. I think this comes from my own character. I cannot draw full, noisy illustrations with a lot happening. I love emptiness and the sound of silence.
Could you walk us through your method for creating your artwork?
Roughly:
I always start with research about my subject. I gather as much information as possible, jot down loads of ideas and keywords and I collect images that might be useful.
I make a storyboard, which helps me plan how the story and illustrations will develop.
I make sketches and studies of the main character, compositions and other relevant subjects, asking myself ‘what is important to show’? What do I want to emphasize? And (very important) how can I add humour? (For example, the puffin who comes and goes in the background of most of the spreads in Finn the Little Seal). I make my sketches in felt tip because you cannot rub them out, and I work more spontaneously this way. I’m not using any colour yet at this stage.
Before creating the final artwork, I make a full-size dummy book with the finished sketches. This lets me experience the work as if it is a finished book and helps to check that everything is well ‘constructed’. I usually end up with a huge pile of paper.
After making copies of all the pages I use my lightbox to transfer the sketches/drawings with pencil onto watercolour paper. I stretch the paper on glass and when dried I can start drawing and colouring the final artwork, using ink, watercolour pencils and watercolour paints.
Can you tell us a bit about your research for Finn the Little Seal?
My research for Finn covers a big part of my own experiences. When I lived on North-Uist we often saw grey seals with their pups in the sea, but also pups all by themselves lying between the rocks. I have loads of photos as well I can draw inspiration from.
Both Peg and Uan (from your previous books) were based on animals you knew, while Finn is a brand-new character. Did this change the way you approached drawing him, compared to the other two?
Drawing Finn was a bit different from drawing Uan and Peg. Uan and Peg were our pets. I cuddled them, held them on my lap, played with them… There was physical contact. I can still smell them and remember how they felt when I stroked them. I knew their characters. With a seal it’s different. You have to observe from a distance and try to get to know a seal’s real character before you can translate it into a children’s book character like Finn.
There is a real sense of motion in your work on this book, particularly in the vignettes of Finn exploring rock pools and later playing in the water – how do you achieve this in your work?
I always try to imagine myself being the character I have to draw. I think it helps to achieve this sense of motion and playfulness. I like the spread with Finn and Sula playing together. They look so happy.
What did you most enjoy about working on this project?
I most enjoyed the process of developing Finn’s character, and the other characters as well, figuring out how to express their emotions through the illustrations.
The Scottish coastal landscape comes across really strongly in your illustrations, do you have a favourite place in Scotland?
I love every place in Scotland; as soon as I touch ground in Scotland, I feel happy. But North Uist is still my favourite place to be. I lived there for many years and I still feel connected with the island and its people. The scenery is so wild and so beautiful, but bleak, harsh and implacable as well. There is water everywhere. The light in winter is absolutely unsurpassed. When there is no wind (not that often…) the reflections of the landscape in the water create a magical, nearly surreal atmosphere. It was here that I experienced what nature really is.
Finn the Little Seal, by Sandra Klaasen is published by Kelpies (an imprint of Floris Books), priced £5.99
Imagine waking up in an unfamiliar bed, with an unrecognisable life, and memories of another life that are utterly different to your surroundings. This is the premise of Stephanie McDonald’s second novel, the psychological thriller, Inference. Read this extract, and you’ll have to discover what happens next . . .
Extract taken from Inference
By Stephanie McDonald
Published by Ringwood Publishing
I come to with a gasp, sucking in air as though it is in dangerously short supply. I survey the room with hungry eyes, praying that the urgent nature of my awakening is down to the fact that I’ve been released from the nightmare that I had come to believe was real life. But prayers, as I accepted a long time ago, are pointless. No-one is listening. At least, not to me.
I run over the memories of my date with Kevin again – for that’s what they are, memories – and verify every part of our conversation, every bite of my meal, every light brush of his hand against mine. It wasn’t a dream. It happened.
I didn’t want to fall asleep again, for fear of where I might be, or what might have happened to me, by the time I woke up again. And now that I’ve awoken for the second time in this strange room, I have to agonisingly come to terms with the fact that what I am enduring right now is definitely not a dream, and that my only hope of getting out of this hell-onearth predicament that I’m in is to figure out why I am here. And why this is happening to me. The only explanation I can produce is that I’ve been kidnapped. But how? And why? And why is this man trying to make me believe that I’m someone else entirely?
I burst into tears, shivering with cold and with the despair that slides through my veins like an icy ink. The room is darker now, with barely any light illuminating its contents. But only a glance to my left, to where the heavy curtains are drawn, is needed to confirm my fear: that I am not at home.
Jamie is not in the room, which is at least something to be thankful for. I don’t even remember falling asleep, but a glance at the clock, which I’m noticing for the first time because its hands are neon yellow, tells me that I have been offline for about three hours. The fact that not a single morsel of food has passed my lips since the sticky toffee pudding I had for dessert on my date with Kevin is brought to my attention by a loud, uncomfortable growl emanating from my stomach. Jamie offered to make me something earlier, but how could I possibly think about eating? I feel like I am literally living a nightmare, and the sensation does not support a healthy appetite.
Last night, I was a carefree, single woman of thirty-two, enjoying dinner and a few drinks with an old flame. The most pressing issues working on my mind when I laid my head on my pillow after returning home were whether it was truly wise to see Kevin again, and whether it would be obvious to my boss that I had been out drinking on a school night. Now, less than a day later (or two days, if Jamie’s assertion that today is Saturday is to be believed), I’m trapped on an island that I apparently have no means of getting off of, with a man who claims that I have been in a relationship with him for over three years, and furthermore claims that my recollections of my past, my life, are nothing more than hallucinations created by a malfunctioning psyche. What am I supposed to do with that?
The only thing I can think of doing, in this instant, is reinforcing the truth in my mind.
My name is Natalie Elizabeth Byron. My first name was chosen at random, for no other reason than I ‘looked like a Natalie’ when I was born, but my middle name is an homage to my grandmother on my mother’s side. My father is a railway worker of thirty years’ experience, by the name of Iain Byron. My mother is a paralegal; her name is Gillian.
I was born in Glasgow’s bespoke maternity hospital on the twenty-ninth of July nineteen eighty-three, which means that I am still closer to thirty-two than thirty-three by the skin of my teeth, and I’m going to cling to that status for as long as possible. I am the second eldest of four, with an older sister called Gemma, a younger one named Anna, and a younger brother called Max.
I live alone, and have done so for some years now, having flown the coop at the tender age of nineteen when I opted to live a little closer to the university that I attended for one year, then abandoned in favour of gainful employment. My home is a relatively small but cosy house that I was fortunate enough to procure for a decidedly knock-down price when the property market took a nose dive a few years ago.
I work full-time, for the Criminal Records Bureau in Glasgow, ritually performing mind-numbing tasks that I have been carrying out for so long that I could do them with my eyes closed. As jobs go, it’s not the worst – it is far from difficult, and affords me a decent lifestyle. I have a nice home, a recently-purchased car (not brand new, but not an old banger either), and usually manage to enjoy two or three holidays per year.
I have a loving family a stone’s throw from where I live, and a small but close circle of friends that I see often and would trust with my life.
*
I’ve been wracking my brains, trying to come up with a motive, a reason why Jamie would do this, but other than him being the one out of the two of us with serious mental health issues, I am at a loss. Something like this takes meticulous planning, surely, so there must be a part of him that lives in the real world. An organised, calculating part. He has managed to get me here, all the way from Glasgow, so he must have had a pretty detailed plan in order to pull that off. Perhaps he had help, I think to myself with a shudder of unease.
There must be something I’m missing. First of all, why have I been chosen? I have never so much as laid eyes on Jamie before, and I can categorically say that I had no idea that the Isle of Càrn even existed before today. So, perhaps I was kidnapped at random. I don’t know whether the randomness is a good thing or a bad thing, but I do know that being kidnapped is most certainly not good. Secondly, whilst it’s probably safe to assume that the person doing the kidnapping is something of a crazy person, what does he have to gain by telling me that I’m crazy? So that I am more likely to comply, I quickly provide in response to my own question. If he can wear me down, and make me dance to his tune, then by definition his life will be a lot easier than if I were hell-bent on escaping from him and returning to my life.
A ripple of fear travels the length of my spine as I try to assess just how scared I should be of this man who has me here at his mercy. So far, he hasn’t done anything to hurt me, physically. He hasn’t been mean or nasty to me or given me any reason to think that my gruesome, painful death might be imminent. He hasn’t laid an inappropriate finger on me, and I have woken up wearing the same clothes that I dressed myself in earlier, seemingly unbothered. All things considered, I don’t know whether his apparent innocuousness makes me more terrified than if he were an axe-wielding, wild-eyed lunatic.
What does he want from me? Assuming that, somehow, he could get me to play along with his alternative reality and ‘become’ Jen, where do we go from here? Am I destined to live out the rest of my days on an island with more elevations measuring above one hundred feet than people?
If what he told me earlier is true, and today is Saturday, then there is a very good chance that my absence will have been noted and highlighted to the appropriate authorities by now. If all of Friday came and went without any contact taking place between my mum and I, then at the very least my parents will have gone to my house to investigate. They have a spare key, for emergencies, and given the close relationship that I have with my family, the absence of at least a text in a twenty-four-hour period (more than that now) will have prompted alarm bells to ring.
Inference by Stephanie McDonald is published by Ringwood Publishing, priced £9.99
Charco Press have been translating and publishing gems from South America for only two years, and yet have been gaining fans with each new publication. Alice Piotrowska takes a look at their latest release, Selva Almada’s The Wind That Lays Waste.
The Wind That Lays Waste
By Selva Almada, translated by Chris Andrews
Published by Charco Press
Reverend Pearson is on a mission from God. Accompanied by his slightly resentful and mostly reluctant teenage daughter, Leni, he drives across northern Argentina to convert lost souls into followers of Christ. When their car breaks down in the middle of a desert despite Pearson’s unwavering faith (‘The car won’t let us down. The good Lord wouldn’t allow it’), they end up in the workshop of Gringo Bauer and his assistant Tapioca, whose impressionability and ‘pure soul’ seem to Pearson the perfect mission target. Translated from Spanish by Chris Andrews, The Wind That Lays Waste by Selva Almada is a distinctive debut: atmospheric, tension-packed, and written in vivid, poetic language.
The story is set in one location – a remote car workshop – and happens over a single hot afternoon. The ‘scorching sun’ and deserted landscape are almost tangible through Almada’s writing: the world comes to life with a skirt ‘sticky with sweat,’ the ‘solitude of a cotton field,’ a heat-exhausted dog swishing its tail under the table. This is elegant, compact prose, where every description has a well-thought-out place in the narrative. Pearson’s evangelistic quest, for instance, is repeatedly associated with the act of washing and purifying with water – he’s here ‘to wash dirty souls, to make them sparkling clean again’ – conveying his own baptism story, where ‘the river man plunged him into the filthy waters of the Paraná to lift him out again, purified.’ (The contrast between Pearson’s sincere spirituality and the practical minds of the people around him is often genuinely funny. While he remembers his baptism as a formal, life-altering event, his mother ‘just thought [she] would bring him to the river – “I heard on the radio that the Preacher was coming, and I thought I’d go and see what it was about . . . ” His mother laughed as if remembering a prank.’)
These shifts in tone stem from the novel’s multi-perspectivity and Chris Andrews does an excellent job with the English translation, capturing the vivid descriptions and these smallest shifts in tone. Almada changes the point of view every few paragraphs, giving equal attention to all four characters (aside from one chapter where the narrative switches to Bauer’s dog, zeroing in – for good reasons – on its sense of smell). What could become cumbersome in a longer book with multiple settings, works perfectly for this tight and character-driven plot – it gives complexity to the characters and meaning to their actions. It would be easy, in a novel of this length (The Wind That Lays Waste is barely more than a hundred pages), to opt for cut-and-paste characters that can be summarised in a couple of words: a spiritual preacher, a down-to-earth mechanic, a rebellious teenager. Instead, each person is more than he or she seems; the plot is propelled by backstories and motivations that we learn about as we go along. The relationships are similarly complicated; Leni ‘admired the Reverend deeply but disapproved of almost everything her father did. As if he were two different people.’
With this focus on the interactions between the characters, especially paired with the single setting, I often felt that the book could be brilliantly adapted for theatre – a suspenseful God of Carnage-like play where civilised discussions gradually turn sour and finally end in a (literal and metaphorical) storm. As cliché as it sounds that the weather reflects the action in the book, it is a crucial part of Almada’s worldbuilding. For the first half of the novel, everyone seems suspended in the pause before the storm: dozing off, sipping on beer, and engaging in small talk while they try to survive the stifling heat. Nonetheless, the tensions between them grow just as the thunderstorm brews on the horizon, and we’re all waiting for it to come and clear the air – which it does, in a surprising and emotional climax.
A word on translation – and why Charco Press does it so right. By now most people have probably heard of Charco, an Edinburgh-based company that publishes contemporary fiction from Latin America, or at least about some of their books – last year, Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz (translated by Sarah Moses and Carolina Orloff, the company co-founder) was longlisted for the Man Booker International. In a past issue of Books from Scotland, co-founder Samuel McDowell talks about Charco’s approach to publishing works in translation:
A second part of our mission is to bring the very important role of the translator to the fore. It is an art form unto itself and deserves much wider recognition than it currently receives.
All Charco translators are named on the jackets alongside the author. Instead of subtly obscuring the fact that a book has been translated, Charco recognise the work and talent that goes into making a story accessible to a different audience without losing the distinctive style of the original. This is a brilliant mission to have and, hopefully, one that other publishers will follow.
The Wind That Lays Waste by Selva Almada is translated by Chris Andrews and published by Charco Press, priced £9.99
Catherine Czerkawska found out more than she bargained for when she explored her family’s history, which she shares in her latest book, A Proper Person to be Detained. BooksfromScotland caught up with her to talk about what she found out.
A Proper Person to be Detained
By Catherine Czerkawska
Published by Contraband
Your new book, A Proper Person to be Detained, has such an intriguing back story to it. Could you tell us how you came to write this book?
I knew only that there had been a murder in my Leeds Irish family in 1881 and that the victim had been my great, great uncle John Manley, my great grandmother’s young brother, who had been stabbed in the street on Christmas Day. The story in the family was that the murderer had ‘got away with it’ – something that turned out to be only partly true. When I began to research the crime and its terrible aftermath, I discovered a story that was both fascinating and harrowing. One of the biggest surprises for me was that part of the tale took place in Glasgow. We moved to Scotland when I was twelve. My biochemist father got a job here and we made our home in Ayrshire, but I had no idea that the family had any previous connection with Scotland.
How did you find the experience of writing about your own family? Was it harder to switch off from this project than your previous books?
It was certainly harder, but also more rewarding because it filled in a number of gaps in my family history. I had to tell the truth about those long ago events, but I also had to do it from a position of involvement. It might have been more difficult if I didn’t have a background in social history. (I have a Masters in Folk Life Studies from Leeds University.)
However, I don’t think even I knew the full extent of the poverty and hardship that Irish migrants to the industrial cities of Britain had to cope with. I went through many months where every new fact unearthed, every new certificate or document that landed in my inbox, seemed to contain some dreadful tragedy. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s a miserable book. These were strong people, especially the women, and they were survivors. They overcame so much that I wanted to celebrate them.
Did you ever think you would tackle the genre of true crime as a writer?
I don’t think I would have tackled this if it hadn’t been uniquely personal. I’m as fascinated as the next person by true crime. I think all writers want to know what makes people tick, want to try to understand why these things happen, but I don’t think as a writer I’m heading in that direction. The book turned out to be as much about the aftermath of the crime both for my family and to some extent for the murderer’s family as anything else.
Crime is an excellent genre for writers to tackle issues of social and political importance, and your book becomes more than an investigation into a family tragedy. Could you tell us a little bit about what you found?
I’ve always been fascinated by the possibility of giving voices to those who have been ignored throughout history, especially the women. Elizabeth Manley, my great great aunt, was the murdered man’s sister and it seemed to me as though her life was curtailed by the crime as surely as the victim’s. It just took a little longer. Viewed from a 21st century perspective, I could understand that she must have been traumatised by witnessing her brother’s violent death, but at the time, very few people, if any, would have understood that, nor the part it might have played in her state of mind and future behaviour. Her story moved me beyond belief.
Your book is set in the late 19th century. How do you think it relates to what’s happening in the UK right now?
There is a very definite relevance. We are inclined to demonise the ‘other’ and so often that means immigrants. In the 19th century, that meant the incoming Irish, fleeing famine. They took jobs that nobody else wanted to do, but were blamed for it anyway. There’s some evidence, for example, that Irish migrants worked in flax rather than cotton mills. 19th century cotton mills were no picnic, but conditions in flax mills were significantly worse. The Irish were damned for working and damned for not working. I like to think of it as Schrödinger’s migrant: being a layabout and stealing jobs simultaneously. It’s not hard to see parallels with Brexit and the hostility towards central and eastern European workers in particular. It’s one of the reasons why I wanted to take the story forward into my own childhood. My father was a postwar Polish refugee. He fought for the allies at Monte Cassino and was resettled in Yorkshire where he met and married my mother. He experienced a certain amount of prejudice, and continued to experience it throughout his working life in particular. Much as I loved him, I’m glad he isn’t around to see what’s happening now.
You’ve often written about the past. What is it about the lives that went before us that inspires you as a writer?
You can get some perspective on the past, whereas it’s much harder to get a real perspective on the present. I would have no idea where to begin to write about what’s going on in the UK now, for example. Even a decade makes a difference. I wrote a play about Chernobyl (Wormwood) for the Traverse Theatre in 1996, but it would have been much more difficult to tackle it in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. Watching the recent wonderful drama about Chernobyl, I found it fascinating to see how distance in time had lent Craig Mazin an even better perspective on what had happened. I think you need a willingness to acknowledge the truth, alongside the ability to put yourself in another person’s shoes. That said, I do get irritated by a tendency in fiction to revise historical attitudes to suit our present day perspectives and preoccupations. When I wrote about Jean Armour (another strong woman) in The Jewel, people often asked me if I would have fallen for Robert Burns, and seemed disappointed when I said ‘of course!’ Simple honesty comes into play. Which of us can say, hand on heart, that we haven’t fancied unsuitable people? But more to the point, back then, his combination of charm, good looks and a certain ‘bad lad’ reputation would have made him irresistible to all but the most staid. His promiscuity would have been fairly commonplace, but his ability to make and keep female friends was unusual for a man of his time. As the great Hilary Mantel says, you really can’t make people in historical fiction think things that they never would think. Even if that upsets people.
You’ve also written many books about how women’s lives are shaped by events around them. Are you pleased to see the upsurge in books that shine a light on women’s stories over the centuries? Are there more stories of the unsung that you’d like to see (or write about!)?
I’m very pleased that women’s stories are being told, and pleased too to see initiatives like the West Yorkshire Archives/Huddersfield University History to Herstory project (http://www.historytoherstory.org.uk/) as well as excellent projects in Scotland such as the Glasgow Women’s Library. (https://womenslibrary.org.uk/)
In my own writing, I tend to tackle something that fires my imagination rather than a particular issue, although I do think older women are badly served in both fiction and drama. For once, I have no idea what I’m going to write next. Or, indeed, if. I have a non fiction project with a Burns connection to finish which I’m enjoying very much, but after that, I don’t know. I may go and ‘live alone in a bee loud glade’.
Are there other writers of historical books that you would recommend?
I grew up reading Rosemary Sutcliff and Mary Renault. Two books that have stuck with me for years and that could loosely be called historical are The Owl Service and Red Shift, both by Alan Garner, books in which ancient and modern history are intertwined in extraordinary ways.
I dramatised Stevenson’s Kidnapped and Catriona for BBC R4 in ten hour-long episodes, and still love both books. Alan Breck is probably my favourite fictional hero (or should that be anti-hero?) of all time. Not so much a historical novel as a remarkable novel of its time is The Annals of the Parish by John Galt. I read it when I was researching The Jewel, and was struck by how insightful, funny and affectionate it was, but also how little has changed in small lowland Scottish towns and villages over 200 years.
Another novel I read recently was Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge. It is, essentially, a historical novel, set at the time of the anti Catholic Gordon riots, about which I’m ashamed to say I knew very little. The account of the riots is so vivid and precise that Dickens must surely have spoken to somebody who had witnessed them in the previous century.
What are you reading now?
I always have several books on the go at once. I’m just finishing Douglas Skelton’s Thunder Bay which I’ve enjoyed enormously – classy, elegant prose. Beautifully written. Then I’ll probably go back to Dickens. He was my late mum’s favourite writer and there are a few of his novels I’ve still to read. If I had to name one favourite contemporary author it would be China Mieville. Of course there are parallels with Dickens: the way he creates whole worlds that hang together, no matter how fantastic, the richness of his imagination, the equal richness of his language, the way he can write about cities with a combination of love and terror that is unsurpassed. One of the most frightening and absorbing novels I’ve ever read is his The City & The City. It’s a murder investigation, but so much more than that. It intrigued me and filled my dreams. I always want to tell young writers, or ‘beginning’ writers (I hate that term ‘budding’!) to read Mieville before they prune their prose out of existence. When I was starting out, a writer told me to ‘stop watering my Dylan Thomas adjectives and watching them grow’ – and he was right. But I often think the pendulum has swung too far the other way. Writers and would-be writers need to free their spirits and let them soar. Mieville does it to perfection.
A Proper Person to be Detained by Catherine Czerkawska is published by Contraband, priced £9.99
There have been a spate of great books on walking pilgrimages this year. David Robinson takes a look some of them and finds a variety of interesting journeys.
To the Island of Tides: A Journey to Lindisfarne
By Alistair Moffat
Published by Canongate
The Shepherd and the Morning Star
By Willie Orr
Published by Birlinn
The Spanish have a saying about pilgrimages that makes sense whether you say it backwards or forwards. La ruta nos apartó otro paso natural – ‘the path provides the natural next step.’ Of course it does, and that palindrome expresses a truth we have known for ages. Long before Chaucer’s Canterbury-bound pilgrims met at the Tabard Inn at Southwark or the first pilgrims sewed a scallop shell into their cloaks to show that they were walking to the shrine of St James at Santiago de Compostela, we have known all about how taking our fears and failings on a purposeful journey seems to make them disappear or allow us to face up to them. Ambulato solvitur, as Saint Augustine is supposed to have said. It will be made better by walking.
The best essay I have read on pilgrimages – and where I first came across that Spanish saying – is an article Robert Macfarlane wrote for the Guardian in 2012. In it, he tried to work out why so many people, agnostics as well as believers, want to wander in the spiritual footsteps of others. At the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, the endpoint of the Camino pilgrimage routes, the number of visiting pilgrims makes the case perfectly: 690 in 1985; 327,378 in 2018. And this isn’t just something happening in Catholic southern Europe. It is happening in largely secular Scotland too. Why?
In Travels with a Stick (Birlinn, April 2019), Richard Frazer not only gives an engaging account of his own pilgrim’s progress along the Camino but shows how transformative the whole experience can be. In banning pilgrimages, he argues, the Kirk took a wrong turn 450 years ago: ‘If the Reformers wanted people to use their consciences, think for themselves, and come up with their own, very personal relationship with the universal mysteries … there is no better place to attempt this than on a pilgrimage, where all enjoy equal status.’ As minister of Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh, Frazer successfully pushed the Kirk to change its collective mind about pilgrimages, to the extent that more pilgrim walks are opening up in Scotland right now than in any other part of the UK.
Last month, this website featured a book about just one of them – Ian Bradley’s The Fife Pilgrim Way (Birlinn, June 2019), a hugely informative guide to the history of the places walkers will pass on the 64-mile path between Culross or North Queensferry and St Andrews which officially opens this month. On its signposts, they will see a small vertical ovoid logo based on a 15th century pilgrim’s badge discovered during excavations in St Andrews in 1998. It shows St Andrew being crucified on his diagonal cross, but because the right-hand edge of the badge was missing, it has been completed with the words ‘Fife Pilgrim Way’. As Bradley writes, this design ‘points to the brokenness of pilgrims, many of whom set out on their travels to seek forgiveness of sins and to come to terms with their failings.’ It also hints at ‘the incompleteness of every earthly journey. We set out only to come back again, and every departure involves a return until we make the pilgrimage that awaits each and every one of us as we depart from this world.’
That’s the context in which I’d like to mention two new books by Scottish writers who I don’t think know each other, but who are as affable, creative and thoughtful as any definition of contrariness allows. Yet even though both are defiantly agnostic, two places of pilgrimage – Iona and Lindisfarne – have played an important part in their lives.
Iona was where Willie Orr’s life turned around. When he arrived there, he writes in The Shepherd and the Morning Star (Birlinn, June 2019), he was an impoverished young actor who had just had a breakdown and was addicted to psychiatric drugs. He was also the eldest son of a politician who would go on to lead the Ulster Unionists and become Imperial Grand Master of the Orange Order (until a bigamy scandal cleared the way for Enoch Powell to take his parliamentary seat in 1974). Such establishment links were anathema to Willie, who became a shepherd, forestry worker, tenant farmer, mature student, historical researcher for Tom Devine, teacher and counsellor for disaffected and difficult teens.
I know Willie a small bit but enough to like him a lot, and in the 1990s commissioned him to write a column for the Weekend Scotsman under the byline ‘Rural Voltaire’ that distilled some of the wisdom acquired over his varied career. I didn’t, however, know many of the engrossing stories his book reveals such as how Iona Community founder George MacLeod sat up with him for two nights running to wean him off the drugs, or how RD Laing convinced him that his breakdown was entirely natural, nor did I realise some of the traumas revealed in his memoir brought about by his background and life experiences. But I did at least know that Iona was where he met his wife Jan, and I had some hint of how, even to an agnostic like him, that small Hebridean island was a ‘thin place where past, present and future meet, and the eternal is just below the surface’ and that the island, and the Iona Community in Glasgow, played a pivotal role in him getting his life back on track.
What constitutes ‘thinness’ is, I think, closely linked to pilgrimage itself. Iona and Lindisfarne are, of course, where saints – Columba and Cuthbert respectively – have trod, and walking in the footsteps of St Cuthbert is what Alistair Moffat sets out to do in To the Island of Tides (Canongate, 1 August 2019). The notion that places can somehow absorb the goodness of people who have lived there may well be superstition, but it’s one that we seem prepared to accept, which is why we are so ready to associate ourselves with the holy dead. As he tracks Cuthbert from Old Melrose to Lindisfarne, Moffat comes across plenty of examples: it’s why Walter Scott and Earl Haig wanted to be buried in the north transept of Dryburgh Abbey, and why people were prepared to vandalise St Cuthbert’s Cave in Northumberland by inscribing their names on the boulder by its entrance. On Lindisfarne, it’s why people attach plastic flowers and laminated cards in memory of loved ones to the benches on the Heugh. It’s as if people think that Shakespeare got things the wrong way round in Julius Caesar and that the evil that men do is buried with them while the good lives after them, somehow accessible in the ‘thin places’ of pilgrimage.
I don’t think Moffat really believes that. Though he’s writing a book about a Christian saint, he’s not a Christian himself, but someone who has always believed in the power of place to illuminate history. He’s right about that: surely you have to get up for the early morning communion service, to feel the cold, to hear the prayers that have been said to the same God for 13 centuries, to look out by night and see the dark hump of Bamburgh castle across the sea, to learn about the plants that provided the still hardly faded colours of the Lindisfarne Gospels – surely you have to find out all of these things to open up your mind to a long-dead saint from a small sandy island at the edge of Christendom. If he spent a week there, he writes, ‘perhaps some of the eternal spirits of that magical place would speak to me.’ Even though the Cuthbertian history is fascinating and written with Moffat’s customary elan, there’s clearly something more going on here.
And this bring us right back to where we started. To solving problems by walking, to facing up to fears by making up a journey, to making a pilgrimage – even an entirely secular pilgrimage – and realising the incompleteness of every earthly journey. Because as well as writing about Cuthbert from a firmly Borders perspective (fair enough: the English have claimed him as entirely their own for too long), To The Island of Tides is Moffat’s most personal book since his 2003 memoir Homing. Here, he is also looking back on his own life, his own family (the still-birth of a grand-daughter affected him badly), the mistakes he has made, and the slights and deceits of others he still hasn’t learnt to forgive and forget, but realises that he needs to. At 69, he has, he reckons, ‘ten more summers of active, healthy life in front of me, if I am lucky.’ So the journey to Lindisfarne (‘old name Ynys Medcaut, from Insula Medicata, meaning Isle of Healing’) has another purpose: to refresh his joy in life and help him learn how to face up to death. Pilgrimages have always done this, and maybe in a secular age we actually need them more than ever. La ruta nos apartó otro paso natural, after all.
To the Island of Tides: A Journey to Lindisfarne by Alistair Moffat is published by Canongate, priced £20.00
The Shepherd and the Morning Star by Willie Orr is published by Birlinn, priced £9.99.
At BooksfromScotland we love a book with a Sixties setting, and we think David Wharton’s debut, Finer Things, is an excellent portrayal of London in 1963, just as it’s about to start swinging. In the novel, we meet two very different young woman, destined to be friends, Delia, an East End shoplifter, and Tess, a sheltered but curious art student. In this extract, Tess visits Delia for the first time for a portrait sitting.
Extract taken from Finer Things
By David Wharton
Published by Sandstone Press
She had imagined she was getting to know this city. The truth, she realised as she walked alone through Fenfield the following Sunday afternoon, was that she had been confined only to the narrow track between her house in Camden and the Moncourt Institute. For half a year, under the impression she was experiencing London, she had been holidaying in a Butlin’s Bohemia: a world created from ideas – and ideas that were not even indigenous. Its artistic passion and sexual carelessness had been borrowed from Paris, its jazz music and beatnik clothes from New York, its espresso coffee from Rome. All this time, there had been an entirely different London just a few Tube stops away from her house, beyond the walls of the camp.
At least the weather had changed. Almost all the snow was gone: melted away over a couple of days and washed into the drains by a night’s rainfall, so she could see Fenfield uncovered.
The reclaimed marshes that had bequeathed this part of the East End its name were long gone, but there were still horses on the streets. One clopped by her now. The old man leading it wore trousers held up with rope, and beneath his flat cap, rheumy eyes squinted out from a labyrinth of black-grained lines. He might have been ninety. His great grandparents could have seen the eighteenth century; lived during the French Revolution. His grandfathers might have fought in Nelson’s navy. Perhaps his parents had sat in the cheap seats of a theatre and sobbed to hear the deaths of Nancy and Little Nell read by Dickens himself. This old man was a reminder of a city now unimaginable: one that pre-dated these dirty Victorian brick tenements, these rows of doors and stacks of windows.
But here too, more recent history was erasing the deeper past. She walked by a Blitzed-out street where kids played hide and seek in the rubble, undeterred by barbed wire fences and UNEXPLODED BOMB signs. After that, she came across a bank of peculiar, semicircular iron buildings, like giant tin cans half-buried in the ground. She recognised them as Nissen huts, the sort you would find on any army camp. These ones must have been thrown up in the post-war years to provide short-term housing for families displaced by the bombing. Their temporariness forgotten, they had evolved into homes, prettily painted, with tidy gardens. All very nice, Tess thought, but you’d surely freeze in winter; in summer you’d boil; and finding furniture to fit against those curved walls must be impossible.
As she walked past one of these Nissens, a threadbare ginger cat jumped up onto a picket fence and picked its way clumsily beside her, mewing and imploring. It slipped on a white-painted paling and had to scrabble frantically to regain its foothold, so Tess stopped to comfort it. At once, the creature’s character transformed. It hissed and swiped at her. Tiny beads of blood bubbled out of the four long scratches its claws left on the back of her hand.
*
Doddington Road was a couple of streets further on. A long, broad thoroughfare. According to her directions, Tess was looking for the first floor of number 158.
Just shout up at the window, Delia had written. I will hear you. It is always open. So Tess looked up and saw that sure enough there was an open casement.
‘Delia!’ she called, keeping her voice low, not wanting to disturb the neighbourhood. Her nerves were still jangling from the encounter with the woman in the Nissen hut. She felt bourgeois, ill-fitting. When nobody answered, she called a second time, raising her voice to an unexpectedly satisfying bellow.
Delia’s face appeared at a different window, further along the wall. ‘Oh, hello there. I didn’t know if you’d come.’
‘Sorry. I’ve been shouting up at the wrong place.’
‘No, that’s mine all right. I’m in my friend’s flat. She’s doing my make-up. Hold on, I’ll come and let you in.’ Delia vanished inside again. A moment later, someone else stuck her head out of the same window. This must be the friend Delia was visiting: a young woman, blonde, around Tess’s age. Her features were terribly damaged, the bottom jaw misaligned, the left eye almost closed, the nose broken.
‘You the one ‘oo’s painting Dee?’ she said, revealing that several of her front teeth were missing.
‘That’s me.’
‘Nice. Make a better picture than I would, won’t she? Face like mine!’ There was no bitterness in the young woman’s voice, only gloomy acceptance.
‘Actually—’ Tess began. She was about to explain that suffering and loss were the most interesting things to paint, and this ravaged creature would make an excellent subject. But she realised how unkind this sort of truth was, and she stopped herself.
‘Yeah?’ the young woman said.
‘I’m here for Delia today. But I could come back another time.’
The door to 158 opened. The face at the window vanished indoors.
Delia was barefoot, in tight high-waisted grey trousers and a white cotton blouse, like a man’s business shirt cut for a woman’s body. Precise, well-made clothes, incongruous in this rough doorway on this run-down street. Her broken friend had done an excellent job with the make-up too, just enough to sharpen and underline her features. Tess had guessed Delia must make her living from men somehow. Clearly she was doing well out of it.
*
In the living room, Delia sat self-consciously on a battered leather settee. Tess paused from drawing.
‘You don’t need to keep so still, you know.’ She tried to sound like it wasn’t a criticism. ‘It’s not that sort of portrait.’
‘Sorry.’ Delia changed her unnatural pose for another just as bad, then she froze again.
The room was furnished in a jumble of styles – from, Tess assumed, whatever had been around when necessity arose. A ponderous 1930s sideboard stood next to new melamine shelves. The coffee table’s pointed legs and rounded corners had been fashionable ten years previously.
There was one of those spring-loaded ashtrays on an art deco pillar. The sort that looked like a flying saucer. Before now, Tess had only seen them in coffee bars, never in anybody’s house. The green of the linoleum on the floor had faded here and there where the light fell most strongly, and in what appeared to have been the only consciously aesthetic decision anyone had made, the walls had been painted cream, not quite obscuring the wallpaper’s pattern of tiny pink flowers beneath. Shabby as it was, everything looked clean. Delia owned no dust-collecting ornaments, had hung no pictures on the walls. The only remotely personal items Tess could see were a few books on a shelf. As well as the entrance to the flat, there were three other doors: two closed and an open one, through which the kitchen was visible.
‘How long have you been here – in this flat?’ Tess asked.
Delia counted out the time on her fingers. ‘Twelve years.’
‘Is it rented? I rent a room myself. It’s hard to make it personal, I find,’ she said, in a feeble attempt to make some kind of connection. Really, Tess’s study-bedroom was filled everywhere with markers of herself. There were novels she loved; a promotional poster for Lust for Life she’d persuaded the cinema manager in Dewsbury to let her have; picture postcards she had received; bits of her own artwork. The crazy, ancient typewriter.
Delia wasn’t taken in. She remained cagey. ‘This building belongs to my boss – Stella. The rent comes out of my earnings.’
‘I see. I suppose she doesn’t allow you to change too much of it?’
‘She don’t care, long as you don’t burn the place down. A lot of the girls in here’ve made their flats really nice. Me, I don’t like a lot of clutter.’
‘No. I can see that.’
‘You never know when you might have to move on, do you?’
Twelve years of that attitude must feel like a long time, Tess thought. But she’d broken through to something more honest, more personal, so she pursued it. ‘So, Stella owns the shop?’ she said.
Delia looked puzzled, ‘The shop?’
‘Where you work? You mentioned at the Gaudi that you work in a shop.’
‘Yeah, that’s right. Stella owns the shop. It’s a little couturier’s in Chelsea.’
Tess had become something of a liar herself recently. It had given her an ear for it. She put down her pencil and said, ‘Thanks for letting me do this.’
Delia reached down the side of the settee for her handbag and took out a silver cigarette case. Something about the way her manner had changed reminded Tess of the cat that had scratched her earlier.
‘Why are you here, Tess?’
‘You know why. To do some sketches of you for a portrait.’
‘But why a portrait of me? What makes me so special, to bring you all the way out here to the East End?’
‘I thought you were interesting, that’s all. That is—’ There was a liberating, thrilling quality about telling the truth. Careful, she thought, once you start, you might not be able to stop. ‘You struck me as the sort of person who has secrets.’
Delia tapped her cigarette against the flying saucer ashtray. ‘Secrets?’
‘Well, I don’t know what you do, but I don’t believe you work in a shop.’
‘Good,’ Delia said. ‘That’s better than trying to wheedle things out of me all roundabout. If you want to know anything, just ask. Here, let me show you something.’ She crossed to one of the closed doors and opened it. ‘Come and take a look.’
When the house had been carved up into flats, this must have been intended as a bedroom. Delia had turned it into a wardrobe. There were several rows of metal rails, the kind you saw in shops, on which hung uncountable coat hangers bearing dresses, blouses, skirts, jackets and coats. A long theatrical dressing table stood against the far wall with lights around the mirror. On it, Tess saw half a dozen wigs of different colours, four jewellery boxes and a vast array of make-up.
‘It’s only me in the flat,’ Delia said. ‘So I sleep in the box room and I keep all my things in here.’
Tess stepped inside. She didn’t know much about fashion, but she could see how expensive this hoard must be. Time to risk some genuine truth telling, she thought.
‘So you’re a thief, then?’
‘A hoister,’ Delia said.
Finer Things by David Wharton is published by Sandstone Press, priced £7.99
Jenny Colgan is the award-winning author of numerous novels, across a range of genres and audiences, and her writing never fails to put a smile on the faces of all her fans. BooksfromScotland caught up with her to ask her about her latest novel The Bookshop on the Shore.
The Bookshop on the Shore
By Jenny Colgan
Published by Sphere
You have just released a new novel, The Bookshop on the Shore. Can you tell us about it?
It’s about a single mother, Zoe, who leaves London with her kid to look after somebody else’s (slightly feral) kids, as well as run a little bookshop in the Highlands.
It’s not quite a follow up to The Little Shop of Happy-Ever-After, though the setting the same, and some characters reappear. Why did you want to revisit Kirrinfief?
That’s right. I just loved the town and location I’d come up with – a small village nestling next to Loch Ness – and wanted to go back there. Plus I like my little book bus, tootling about, serving remote communities who don’t have a bookshop of their own, so I wanted to write about that too.
You’ve set other books in the Highlands. What is it about rural Scotland that you find makes for good storytelling?
I think there’s a couple of reasons: partly because the beauty of the place really knocks you out. You can’t ignore it. We’re only in Fife, so practically sassenachs, but even so, it’s just so formidably lovely that even if you aren’t an outdoorsy person you can’t really help being affected.
The other thing is I like writing about slightly isolated communities where you have to get to know your neighbours and do things communally and so on, which is quite common in Scotland, and that means I get to write across the generations; older people and younger, richer and poorer and so on.
The novel also has bookselling at its core. Have you been a bookseller yourself? Why do you think bookshops are ideal as a romantic setting?
I have! I had a Saturday job at the bookshop in Ayr that eventually became James Thin’s, when it was at the top of the town. I wasn’t very good at it though I just read all the stock and ignored the customers. But the women who worked there were lovely to me. When I left to go to university they presented me with my entire first-year reading list as a going-away present, an exceptional act of kindness I have never forgotten.
The novel has been described as ‘heartwarming’, ‘sweet’ and ‘wonderful’, yet you don’t shy away from writing about serious subjects such as poverty and mental health. How do you balance tackling these themes and keeping your books positive?
Do you know I was thinking about that the other day! I’m known as a ‘feel good’ author; except in my books I have had catastrophic mental health issues; a middle-aged man who took two entire novels to die of cancer; a Syrian refugee who loses his wife and his children; infertility and African adoption; fatal fishing accidents and childhood abuse – so I am not entirely sure how I earned the tag! I suppose I try and come at life in a cheerful way. It’s never quite as bad as what we hear on the news.
You are a hugely prolific writer, and write in a number of genres for a number of audiences too. How do you keep all these many worlds clear in your head for each project?
Genre is imposed from the outside really, I’m just writing stories that I love, then they get parcelled into categories later on, so it’s not remotely difficult.
What writers inspire you as a reader?
Loads! Obviously in my work James Herriot, Douglas Adams and Enid Blyton but I read a lot of non-fiction. I break the fourth wall sometimes like CS Lewis – what DO they teach you at school these days, that kind of thing. Adams did that a lot as well, I am always a sucker for a bit of digression that starts, ‘The thing about X is..’ Oh and I loved Maeve Binchey too, I love her generosity towards all her characters.
What are you reading just now?
I’ve just finished Midnight in Chernobyl; I’m reading everything I can lay my hands on about the topic because the TV series was just so excellent. The real story was inevitably more complex but it doesn’t take away from how much the tv show got to the essence of the truth. And I’ve just read a run of really good crime – I love Denise Mina, and her new one is going to blow everyone away, and the new Nikki French is predictably excellent.
Do you think you’ll revisit Zoe and Hari in another novel?
They have cameos in my forthcoming novel The Switch, because I really love writing children, and The Bookshop on the Shore has a bunch of them.
The Bookshop on the Shore by Jenny Colgan is published by Sphere, priced £12.99
Staying with backdrop of the Italian Resistance during World War Two, BooksfromScotland is delighted to share with you an extract from Gordon Kerr’s debut thriller, The Partisan Heart. Michael Keats is a journalist, mourning the loss of his wife who has been killed in a hit-and-run incident in the Italian countryside. When he discovers she was having an affair, he decides to travel to Italy to find out the truth behind her infidelity and uncovers a story of betrayal that goes back decades. We pick up the action when Michael has requested a meeting with the man he believes is his wife’s lover.
Extract taken from The Partisan Heart
By Gordon Kerr
Published by Muswell Press
The station bar was quiet. The waiters lounged at the till, talking to each other, glad of the rest. The gap between breakfast and lunch seemed, to some of the old- timers, at least, to get shorter every year and soon they would again be gliding across the stone floor, trays carrying impossible quantities of drinks, hands dealing out change like lightning and placing receipts on tables, or pulling the tops off bottles, always with their eyes looking in another direction, searching out the next order or the nearest short skirt.
Michael sat at a table close to the wall with a good view of the entrance to the bar and ordered his usual macchiato. ‘Dirty coffee,’ Rosa used to call it. To make identification possible, he had asked, in his letter to the man who had been with Rosa, that he carry a copy of each of two newspapers – La Gazzetta dello Sport and the London Times. This was a mixture he felt was unlikely to be found very often. The place was so quiet, however, that this fussiness seemed slightly redundant.
There was a huge clock on the wall behind the bar. The hands moved laboriously, with a loud clunking noise. It was, indeed, as if time had become audible, as if it could be heard passing.
Ten to twelve . . . clunk, clunk . . .
Seven minutes to twelve . . . clunk, clunk . . . The hands moved as if passing through something viscous and heavy. Michael began to sweat, in spite of the fact that it was chilly in the vastness of this huge edifice.
With four minutes remaining before the appointed time for the meeting, he regretted having sent the letter. He regretted having gone to Rogerson & Gilchrist, he regretted his trip to the Lighthouse Hotel. He began to feel very warm. What was he going to say to this man, anyway? ‘So, you’re the chap who was screwing my wife? Pleased to meet you.’ It was not going to be the easiest conversation. He fought for the right words, but his mind was confused and nothing of any sense was rising to the surface. Most likely, he was going to walk away without saying a word, but, somehow, for some unknown reason, he felt he had at least to see him.
Three minutes to twelve . . . he lifted his coffee cup to his lips only to find his mouth filling with the bitter dregs from the bottom of the cup.
Two minutes to twelve . . . A man came in carrying La Gazzetta and Michael sat up, but there was no English paper and he turned round and walked out again just as soon as he came in.
Three minutes past twelve . . . He checked his watch, but the bar clock was indeed correct.
Ten minutes past twelve . . . His eyes darted to his watch again and his heart sank and rose at the same time. He need not find out the truth, need not confront Rosa’s secret life.
Twenty- three minutes past twelve . . . Positive joy at the thought of not having to deal with this, of being able to luxuriate in the idea that it might not be true; he may, in fact be wrong about what had been happening in the most important part of his life.
At half past twelve he stood up and negotiated a path between the tables to the door and out through the main section of the station towards the massive exit.
He failed to notice the figure leaning on the wall just outside the bar who pulled the collar of his heavy jacket tight around his neck, threw a darting glance to his right and his left and then fell into step about twenty yards behind him.
*
His train of thought was interrupted by a plump figure making his way between the rows of desks. Bruno Barni and Michael had spent time in each other’s company on several occasions. Most memorably, they had travelled together across America with Bill Clinton’s cavalcade of journalists and hangers- on for the last month of the 1992 American election campaign. They had spent many nights carousing and bemoaning their journalistic fates in small town America and, as is always the case in such circumstances, had, on their last night in each other’s company, sworn eternal friendship. Since then they had exchanged the occasional postcard, but had always failed to meet up whenever Michael had visited Italy or when Bruno had come to London.
‘Michael, how are you?’
‘All the better for seeing you, my old friend.’ They clasped each other in a bear hug and then Bruno stepped back, holding Michael by the shoulders.
‘I was so sorry to hear about your wife, Michael. I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t.’
‘Me neither, Bruno. As you can imagine, it’s not been easy.’ Bruno put an arm around Michael’s shoulder, walking him back the way he had come.
‘Come on, let’s get out of this dump and grab some lunch. I’ll just get my jacket.’
They had almost finished their first bottle of red wine before the food arrived at the table. Michael had explained everything to Bruno and Bruno now sat shaking his head and running his hand through his thinning black hair.
‘You mean you had no idea?’
‘None whatsoever, Bruno.’ He smiled at the apparent absurdity of it. Surely you can tell when someone has fallen out of love with you? Surely you know when that someone is dreaming of a life with someone else? ‘Hey, I know what you’re thinking. How come I didn’t realise? Well, Bruno, it seems you just don’t.’ He smiled at Bruno and reached for the bottle, sharing the remnants between both glasses, at the same time indicating to a passing waiter that they were in need of another.
‘Ah, Michael.’ Bruno shook his head and stared into Michael’s eyes. ‘But, hey, you remember what we used to say whenever we hit one of those small towns in the States in ninety- two?’
They said it together, smiling at the memory: ‘It don’t get much worse than this!’
‘But look, you say you don’t know who this guy is . . .?’ Bruno said this between hungry mouthfuls of cotoletta alla Milanese and Michael recalled just how much Bruno had loved his food in America. He would start the morning with a huge pile of pancakes and maple syrup and work his way through whatever food he could get his hands on as the day wore on. Michael, a sparing eater at the best of times and especially when on the road, would look on in wonder and sometimes even disgust, as steaks, ice cream, waffles, and hamburgers would disappear in ever larger quantities into that grinning mouth. ‘You have no idea . . .?’
‘Well, I know he’s Italian. I know he wears a size forty- four jacket. I know he has expensive taste. Oh, and I think I have a name that has some kind of connection to him.’ He put down his knife and fork and searched in his inside pocket for his wallet. From it he fished out the card that he had discovered in the jacket pocket that drunken night at the Lighthouse Inn and handed it to Bruno. ‘Or it could even be him, for all I know. I found that card in the pocket of the jacket I was sent.’
Bruno, in turn placed his knife and fork on the table and took the card from Michael.
‘Massimo Di Livio, Via Broletto No. 110, Milano.’ He read from the card and then turned it over in his fingers like a playing card with which he was performing a conjuring trick. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know the name, but I know the street. To live in Via Broletto it helps if you have a lot of money in the bank. This guy is pretty well off.’ He sat up, as if a thought had just occurred to him. ‘But, hey, here’s an idea. Why don’t I run his name through our computers back at the office and have a word with a few people? Even if this isn’t your man, he may at least be able to point you in the right direction.’
Michael concurred. ‘Well, if it’s not too much trouble . . .’
‘It’s no trouble at all, Michael. To tell you the truth, I’d like to help you get to the bottom of this. You seem a little, how do you say . . . dislocated from things, my friend. Understandably so, I might add.’
‘Yes, you’re right, Bruno,’ Michael replied, nodding and smiling slightly. ‘I think I need what our American friends would call closure.’
They finished the meal talking about the old days and took leave of each other, agreeing to speak by telephone later in the day once Bruno had made his enquiries.
Michael walked unsteadily back to the Stazione Centrale and, even after drinking a bitter espresso at the bar in which he had waited in vain earlier in the day, he dozed all the way back to Beldoro, waking with a start as the train pulled into the station. He had intended to finish his piece at the office, but he had drunk way too much and would need to sleep it off before he could concentrate sufficiently to put together something cogent.
His shadow in the heavy jacket who had followed him to the newspaper office and sat at a corner table of the restaurant, slowly eating a dish of pasta, watched him climb onto the train before walking purposefully in the direction of a phone box at the exit to the station.
*
‘Michael! I so enjoyed our lunch. I am just sorry it couldn’t have taken place in happier circumstances.’
Michael’s head felt fuzzy. He had lain down and almost immediately fallen asleep on the bed when he had returned to his room. Just before the telephone’s shrill ring had jarred his senses around seven, he had once again found himself in the blue room with Rosa’s flailing body speeding towards him, but never quite reaching him, on the bonnet of the blue car.
‘But let me tell you, I’ve found something on your Massimo Di Livio. Something very interesting.’
‘Yes, go on, Bruno. What have you got?’ He rubbed the sleep from his eyes, making himself comfortable against the headboard of the bed.
‘Now look, Michael, you said that this man was a big man?’
‘Yes . . . the jacket was a size forty- four. I don’t know what that is in European sizes . . .’
‘Oh, don’t worry, Michael, I’ve bought clothes in England. Forty- four is a substantial man. Not as substantial as me, of course, but that only comes with a lot of practice.’
Michael smiled.
‘No.’ His voice turned serious now. ‘This Di Livio character, he is known to us. In fact, he is known also to the police; perhaps a little more intimately than we know him.’
‘What do you mean, Bruno?’
‘Well, I asked around – as you know I have some friends in the police – and I also had a look in our archives and came up with some interesting stuff about signor Di Livio.’ There was a moment’s silence and Michael guessed that Bruno was probably taking a sip from a glass of the bourbon he had grown to like so much in the States and which had been the cause of so many hangovers during those few weeks. ‘For example, in 1968, he was suspected of being one of the henchmen of a guy running a protection racket in Turin. Three of his colleagues went to prison. He walked.’ Another pause, another sip. ‘In 1973, he was charged with rearranging the face of another character in the same line of business. Again, he walked – this guy has good lawyers, believe me. He stayed clean for ten years and then in 1979 he did time for some very tricksy financial dealings. His crime had gone legit,’ – Bruno enjoyed using the argot of the American crime novels he loved so dearly – ‘but signore Di Livio hadn’t. He did three years and since he came out he seems to have kept his nose clean. He is very careful.’
‘Good God, Bruno. That’s unbelievable! How could Rosa get mixed up with such a man?’ Michael was by now sitting bolt upright on his bed.
‘That’s just it, Michael. I’ve asked around and I also found some pictures. This is a seventy- year- old man who is as thin as a string of spit and is no more than five feet five inches tall. And if that wasn’t enough to convince you, well, let me just say that from the conversations I have had, Di Livio’s proclivities lie on the more, erm, muscular side, if you get my drift. No, believe me, Michael, this is definitely not your man.’
The Partisan Heart by Gordon Kerr is published by Muswell Press, priced £12.99
Karen Campbell may be best known for her crime series starring her detective Anna Cameron, but, as Alistair Braidwood writes, she is fast becoming a writer of real range and emotional power.
The Sound of the Hours
By Karen Campbell
Published by Bloomsbury
Sometimes a novel comes out of nowhere to delight and surprise you, not following any current trends or themes. That is the case with The Sound of the Hours, Karen Campbell’s latest. Set in Italy in 1943, just after the arrest of Mussolini, it uses an unlikely romance, set against the backdrop of World War II, to examine religion, politics, race, family, and what it means to belong. Perhaps the least surprising thing about it is that Campbell is the author as there are few writers who have the range of subjects and styles evident in their bibliography as she now does. The Sound of the Hours is her seventh novel and, after her initial series of Glasgow-based police procedurals, she wrote This Is Where I Am, a powerful account of the relationship between a Somalian refugee and his mentor, (which was a BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime). She followed that with Rise, a novel that takes some of the familiar themes and tropes of Scottish literature and art and plays with them to great effect.
The Sound of the Hours is the first time Campbell takes her readers outside of Scotland (with a couple of notable exceptions), setting the majority of the story in Barga, a Tuscan town with strong Scottish connections to this day. She has clearly got a keen sense of the place and its history – knowledge that you suspect comes not only from time spent there, but also from extensive investigation. This allows you to immerse yourself in this world, and you feel you could find your way around the streets, and to the houses, markets, churches, and graveyards that are portrayed, with little trouble. Yet, it’s a novel that wears such research lightly, getting the balance between entertaining and informing just right. As with all of Karen Campbell’s novels, her characters are the key.
We are introduced to seventeen-year-old Vittoria ‘Vita’ Guidi and her family whose split loyalties and the tensions that result mirror the Italy of the day. It is a country that became disputed territory in the last throws of the Second World War, with German occupation under threat from an encroaching United States Army. Many Italians became pawns in this dangerous game, having to react to changes in who was in charge on a regular basis. Campbell captures the pressures on civilians as war rages around them, and how that heightens day-to-day living as well as emotions. Vita and her family are caught in the middle and have to find new ways to survive.
The other strand of the novel is the story of Frank Chapel, a ‘Buffalo Soldier’, the nickname for African American U.S. Army personnel. Frank is an educated liberal, a Berkeley College straight-A student who believes he is destined for officer status but soon finds out that the army is not going to allow him to reach the higher ranks, and he finds himself the victim of institutional racism for the first time in his life. Frank has to quickly adjust his view of not only what the army has to offer, but also how his life may unfold.
Campbell puts us in the boots of men fighting for a country that does not let them vote. Even after swearing an oath to lay down their lives they find themselves eating and sleeping in separate areas from other soldiers. When even the army becomes segregated it becomes clear where cultural priorities lie. Shipped to Italy to help liberate the country from German occupation, and make sure that Mussolini and his acolytes remain out of power, Frank finds himself in a strange land where his uniform creates one response, the colour of his skin another.
When Frank and Vita meet (an unforgettable scene) it is clear that theirs is a relationship that will have to overcome huge odds, and it unfolds beautifully with Campbell eschewing the easy and obvious route of love conquering all for a more nuanced and believable story. Rather it’s the other strands of their stories that are brought to the fore as they are separated almost as soon as they meet, making not only for a more interesting read, but adding a romantic tension and suspense that it would not have otherwise. Vita’s priority is to keep herself and her family safe, while Frank must negotiate fighting battles internally and externally as he tries to make his way back to her.
As I mentioned earlier, Campbell uses this relationship to examine wider concerns. She looks at how carrying fundamental positions and prejudices, whether religious, political, or ideological, can tear families, and nations, apart, themes that have rarely been more expedient than they are today. She also considers the role of women in times of war, and how that alters family dynamics and relationships. As the boys play at soldiers the women have to not only patch them up, but also try and live as normal a life as possible all the while fearing the worst. Questions of heroism and sacrifice, and what forms they take, are never far from the surface.
If you can imagine Captain Corelli’s Mandolin meets Catch 22 you’ll have some idea as to what The Sound of the Hours is like. There is the romance of place and its people of the former, the absurdity and madness of war of the latter, and the clash of cultures of both. It’s a novel to get lost in – one that transports you to another time and place, and you cannot help but become involved and emotionally invested with the lives of those who live there. It’s also a timely reminder that any discussion about the best contemporary Scottish novelists should include Karen Campbell.
The Sound of the Hours by Karen Campbell is published by Bloomsbury, priced £14.99
Scotland’s excellent crime writing community have been knocking it out the park in 2019, so if you’re really having trouble deciding what book to take to the beach, the hills, the tent, the caravan, or the swanky hotel (if you’re pushing the boat out), then look no further than this dazzling dozen . . .
Breakers by Doug Johnstone (Orenda Books)
Doug Johnstone’s latest novel has been generating the kind of reviews every writer dreams of, has been longlisted for the McIllvanney Prize, and comes recommended from the likes of Mark Billingham, James Oswald and Ian Rankin – we’re not going to argue with those plaudits!
The novel follows the troubled seventeen-year-old Tyler, who lives in one of Edinburgh’s most deprived areas, is caring for his sister and his drug-addict mum, and is bullied into robbing rich people’s homes by his older, tougher siblings. When one robbery goes disastrously wrong, Tyler not only has the the police to worry about but the ruthless crime lord, Deke Holt. Then, he meets posh girl Flick, and he thinks she may just be his salvation … unless he drags her down too.
Fallen Angel by Christopher Brookmyre (Little, Brown)
Christopher Brookmyre keeps getting better and better with each new novel, and he’s unafraid to push what can be done in crime writing. His new novel, Fallen Angel, also McIllvanney-longlisted, sees his characters in sunnier climes, but of course, darkness lurks . . .
When new nanny Amanda accompanies the accomplished Temple family to their seaside villa she finds that beneath the smiles is a family tragedy from the past. She begins to suspect one of them might be hiding the truth about what happened sixteen years ago, and finds herself in dangerous waters.
As ever, Brookmyre keeps the reader on their toes with this one – it’s full of brilliant twists and turns.
Thunder Bay by Douglas Skelton (Polygon)
Douglas Skelton leaves behind his familiar Glasgow settings for this pitch-perfect thriller set on the fictional Scottish island of Stoirm.
Reporter Rebecca Connolly sniffs a good story and travels to Stoirm when she hears that Roddie Drummond – charged but found Not Proven for the murder of his lover years before – is returning to the island for his mother’s funeral. Defying her editor’s wishes, Rebecca digs into the secrets surrounding Mhairi’s death, and her mysterious last words of Thunder Bay, the secluded spot on the west coast of the island where, according to local lore, the souls of the dead set off into the after life. Then another body is found . . .
With his signature jet-black humour, and the stamp of approval from a McIllvaney longlisting, this is the novel which should see Skelton take his rightful place at the top of Scottish crime writing.
Death at the Plague Museum by Lesley Kelly (Sandstone Press)
If you haven’t caught up with Lesley Kelly’s Health of Strangers series yet, then now is the time! The North Edinburgh Health Enforcement Team is an uneasy mix of seconded police and health professionals charged with dealing with The Virus, a mutant – and deadly – strain of influenza that is running riot in the near future.
Death At The Plague Museum is book three, and follows the investigation of the deaths or disappearance of three senior civil servants whose brief is management of the deadly Virus. Bernard, Mona and the rest of the hard-pressed Health Enforcement Team find themselves fighting not just the pandemic, but government secrets.
A Breath on Dying Embers by Denzil Meyrick (Polygon)
Released this month, the much-loved DCI Daley is back, along with fan favourite DS Scott, in this McIllvanney-longlisted seventh book in this series, which began with the bestselling Whisky From Small Glasses.
The UK Government are taking a high-powered group of businessmen and women on a tour of the British isles in a luxury cruiseship as part of a push for global trade. When they dock in Kinloch, one of the crew goes missing, and an elderly local ornithologist disappears, which DCI Daley must investigate. Then the arrival of a face from Daley’s past sends him into a tailspin while the lives of the passengers and crew of SS Great Britain, as well as the country’s economic future, hang in the balance.
Early reviews suggest that this is Meyrick’s best book yet, and for his diehard fans things might get emotional . . .
The Unquiet Heart by Kaite Welsh (Tinder Press)
Who doesn’t like a bit of murder, mystery and derring-do set in Victorian Edinburgh? Kaite Welsh’s Sarah Gilchrist series gives us all those delicious ingredients and more.
Sarah Gilchrist is a woman determined to make her own way in life, and to become a doctor, though her family insists she must marry the dull Miles Green. Yet, when a housemaid in Miles’s family is murdered, and it is Miles himself who comes under suspicion, she comes to his aid. She may not want to marry him, but she won’t see him accused of murder, especially when she has her own suspicions about the killer’s identity.
The Peat Dead by Allan Martin (Thunderpoint)
Scotland is not short on its fictional detectives, but we think it worth your time to introduce yourself to Detective Inspector Angus Blue, sent over to Islay to investigate when five corpses are dug up by a peat-cutter. All of them have been shot in the back of the head, execution style. It is soon discovered that the men were killed on a wartime base over 70 years ago, and that despite the intervening years, the truth behind the men’s deaths should stay hidden.
The Peat Dead has been shortlisted for the inaugural McIllvaney debut prize to be handed out at this year’s Bloody Scotland Festival in September. That’s a good enough endorsement for us!
Fixed Odds by William MacIntyre (Sandstone)
Robbie Munro returns in this fifth outing, defending George ‘Genghis’ McCann on a charge of burglary, and Oscar ‘the Showman’ Bowman, snooker champion, on betting fraud. Genghis has stolen – and lost – a priceless masterpiece, while Oscar doesn’t seem to have a defence of any kind. With another mouth to feed and promises of great rewards if he finds both painting and defence, Robbie has never been more tempted to fix the legal odds in his favour.
If you like your legal thrillers with pace, wit, good humour, and lots of fun, there is no better place to start than here!
Mr Todd’s Reckoning by Iain Maitland (Contraband)
We had to include this new novel from our friends at Contraband, despite the fact that it isn’t by a Scottish author, or has a Scottish setting. But it’s been garnering great reviews, and is surely ripe for adaptation. We’re keeping our fingers crossed!
Behind the normal door of a normal house, in a normal street, two men – father and son – are slowly driving each other insane.
Mr Todd is at his wits end. He’s been robbed of his job as a tax inspector and is now stuck at home with his son, Adrian, who has no job, no friends and stays at home all day, obsessively chopping vegetables and tap-tap-tapping on his computer. And he’s getting worse, disappearing for hours at a time, sneaking off to who-knows-where.
One of them is a psychopath and has developed a taste for killing. And he’ll kill again.
Worst Case Scenario by Helen Fitzgerald (Orenda Books)
Helen Fitzgerald should be on everyone’s bookshelves. If you are interested in writers who are bold, exciting and unapologetic with their themes, characters and humour, then look no further.
Mary Shields is a moody, acerbic probation officer, dealing with some of Glasgow’s worst cases, and her job is on the line. Liam Macdowall was imprisoned for murdering his wife, and he’s published a series of letters to the dead woman, in a book that makes him an unlikely hero – and a poster boy for Men’s Rights activists. When Liam is released on licence into Mary’s care, she develops an obsession with Liam and his world. Then her son and Liam’s daughter form a relationship, and Mary will stop at nothing to impose her own brand of justice with devastating consequences. . .
February’s Son by Alan Parks (Canongate)
Bruised and battered from the events of debut Bloody January, Detective Harry McCoy returns for another breathless ride through the ruthless world of 1970s Glasgow.
Bodies are piling up with grisly messages carved into their chests. Rival gangs are competing for control of Glasgow’s underworld and it seems that Cooper, McCoy’s oldest friend, is caught up in it all. The laws of the street are changing as the wealthy and dangerous play for power. And the city’s killer continues his dark mission. Can McCoy keep his head up for long enough to solve the case?
Dark, pacy yet shot through with compassion on how justice is really served, Harry McCoy might just become your new favourite literary detective.
Perfect Crime by Helen Fields (Avon)
Helen Fields is now onto book five of her DI Callanach thrillers, and they keep getting better and better . . .
Stephen Berry is about to jump off a bridge until a suicide prevention counsellor stops him. A week later, Stephen is dead. Found at the bottom of a cliff, DI Luc Callanach and DCI Ava Turner are drafted in to investigate whether he jumped or whether he was pushed. As they dig deeper, more would-be suicides roll in: a woman found dead in a bath; a man violently electrocuted. But these are carefully curated deaths – nothing like the impulsive suicide attempts they’ve been made out to be.
Little do Callanach and Turner know how close their perpetrator is as, across Edinburgh, a violent and psychopathic killer gains more confidence with every life he takes…
We don’t mind admitting that BooksfromScotland have been on tenterhooks all year for the publication of Lucy Ellmann’s new novel, Ducks, Newburyport. The more we heard about it, the more we were intrigued. So we’re so thrilled it’s now on the bookshelves, and even more thrilled that Lucy Ellmann agreed to speak to Lee Randall about her thoughts on the writing life, and particularly on the conflict between the private world of creating and the public world of promotion.
Ducks, Newburyport
By Lucy Ellmann
Published by Galley Beggars Press
Ducks, Newburyport is full of love and grief. Its 1020 pages of stream-of-consciousness plunge in and out of the lives of a middle-aged American woman and a mountain lion. I’d just finished it when Lucy Ellmann emailed to say she’d prefer to let the book speak for itself and talk instead about the custom of sending writers to public readings and book festivals.
Fine—but I predicted we were destined to disagree. Book events are my natural habitat. I programme the Granite Noir festival, on behalf of Aberdeen Performing Arts, and frequently chair book events.
Lee Randall: I was struck by the strength of your feeling that festivals and other events don’t serve writers. Why not?
Lucy Ellmann: For one thing, writers need money. If you entice writers away from their desks, at least use it as an opportunity to shove money at them. It would also be good to give them a chance to talk to each other more. I don’t think most festivals provide for that enough, except maybe in the green room, by accident.
Randall: What would constitute a useful dialogue?
Ellmann: A conference for only writers, where you have time to talk to each other about books and the book business, and how it’s all gone to pot. The collapse of the Net Book Agreement ruined things for writers. I think it made working in publishing a lot less fun, too.
I was treated really well at Bloomsbury, especially by my excellent editor there, Alexandra Pringle. But I’m getting interested in independent publishers now, because they seem more open than mainstream places to outlandish writing. My new editors at Galley Beggar are very good, and fun to work with. This novel went through a few edits.
Randall: Editing it was time-consuming, I gather.
Ellmann: Yes, it took me at least a month to reread it every time. Fourteen-hour days.
Randall: Can you talk about the book’s technical oddity?
Ellmann: The whole form arose from my current fatigue with straight narrative, which seems sort of phoney to me.
The repeated phrase, ‘the fact that’, was there from the beginning, as an emphatic refrain. But making the whole novel one sentence—that came later.
Randall: Back to festivals and bookstore appearances, aren’t they good ways of connecting with readers?
Ellmann: Sure, but my ability to connect with most people is limited—I’m shy. The ability is in the book if it is anywhere. I don’t want to get up in front of a tough crowd and try to spout my usual insane rhetoric.
People who don’t mind [events] can do them. But if it’s going to set you back for weeks, either preparing for it, or trying to get over the mess you made of it—that’s no help.
Randall: For someone introverted, unhappy with the performative end of writing—or any art form—yeah, public events would be a nightmare. My argument is that a festival tries to create a situation where writers meet people who care passionately about their work—or people who have no idea who they are, but are converted by this exposure to thinking, “Wow, I want to read all their books!”
Ellmann: Or they think, why am I listening to this one when I came to hear the other one?
Festivals need more controversy, conflict. It’s all too optimistic! I’d like a real debate once in a while, not fake ones. I don’t like it when they get too touchy-feely, every book is good, reading is good, buy this one, buy that one. It’s demeaning to books. Every book is treated the same. It’s a way of compacting you, like a crushed car. The individuality is gone.
Randall: For some, events are an antidote to the job’s loneliness.
Ellmann: Ah, but the loneliness is why I like writing. Or aloneness anyway. I am not good with people and they need to be spared me most of the time. Reading a book is totally voluntary, so I don’t feel I’m imposing myself on anybody.
Randall: Are you good with criticism?
Ellmann: It depends how much criticism. I’m pretty easily shaken. But for some reason I am kind of immune to bad reviews! What’s hard is figuring out what the next book is. But I don’t think that’s influenced by the last book’s reception all that much.
My father [biographer Richard Ellmann] once marked some essay of mine all over in red ink, and I couldn’t look at the thing ever again.
Randall: Didn’t you get your own back by editing his Oscar Wilde biography?
Ellmann: Ha ha, yeah! At his request. He was dying, and needed help finishing the book in time. I don’t think I’ve ever used editing as a weapon—yet! But you’re right, that was potentially quite a revenge moment.
Randall: Why don’t you want to talk about Ducks, Newburyport?
Ellmann: I want a book that works on so many levels that it’s hard to talk about. Besides, you’re usually wrong about your own books. You can tell people what you thought you were doing, but that’s the bombardier’s view. You don’t know what’s happening on the ground: I hit the target, or I didn’t quite hit it. Meanwhile, there’s death and devastation all around that you never have to look at. It’s up to the victims to decide what you’ve achieved. We’ll see how they feel.
Randall: Your last novel, Mimi, included a Manifesto of the Odalisque Revolution. What kind of manifesto for change would you present to the festival industry?
Elllmann: The money. It should be in the thousands. Let’s stop pussyfooting around. Writers need heat, clothing, food, a new computer every five years or so, and as much time to write as possible. This book took six years.
Create a festival just for good books, and not necessarily books published that year—why not older books? Organisers always want to promote new stuff. Why?
Or get fifty vetted people in a room with an invited writer. Really engaged people who’ve read all the writer’s books.
Randall: And in your manifesto for publishers?
Ellmann: It’s hard to say. Multiple book deals are a way of nurturing somebody—but it’s a terrible pressure for many writers. And then the publisher often feels, “Well this isn’t quite what we were hoping for,” and there’s ill feeling on both sides. I wish they’d stop bringing out début people and then dropping them because the sales figures weren’t good—the publisher needs to take some responsibility for that. They rarely publicise literary stuff enough.
Randall: You know that’s not true and lots of books sell loads of copies.
Ellmann: Hype.
Randall: How can you say publishers aren’t putting money and marketing muscle behind writers, then complain about hype?
Ellmann: What publishers call ‘literary books’ usually aren’t. More challenging novels are a minority interest, I know. But it shouldn’t all be about sales. At The New Yorker, in the old days, the money people were on a totally different floor and had nothing to do with the editorial board. You’ve got to go back to that. Editors should not have to explain to every marketer why they’re buying a book.
Randall: It strikes me you’d prefer to be an old-fashioned author, a Currer Bell, left to herself to write. The book sinks or swims without you having to do in-person promotion.
Ellmann: Yes. Anonymity might be the way to go. Or a hologram.
Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann is published by Galley Beggars Press, priced £14.99
This year, Edinburgh University Press celebrates 70 years of exceptional publishing. They tell us their story by crunching some numbers . . .
- Founded in 1949, we are among the leading academic publishers in the UK, rooted within one of Britain’s oldest and most distinguished centres of learning.
- Our 2 homes – in 2014 we relocated from our long-term residence at George Square to The Tun at the bottom of the Royal Mile. With more space to grow (and easy access to Arthur’s Seat) it’s been an excellent move for the business.
- We’re multiplying! Investment in staff to expand our publishing programme and outreach has led us to grow from 26 people in 2009 to 39 in 2019. Combined, our current team have worked at EUP for a mammoth 385 years.
- 2018 was a milestone year for us – we published 200 new books for the first time and reached £3 million in revenue for the first time.
- Our 70 years of publishing have produced over 2,300 journal issues, 22,000 articles and over 10,000 book reviews
- From Singapore to Gdansk and Chicago to…Preston, this year our editors and marketers will be travelling to 46 conferences in 13 different countries.
- Our longest running journal is Archives of Natural History – first started in 1936 and published by us since 2008.
- We are proud to put our authors at the centre of all we do – with 5 key commitments:
1. Exceptional communication: authors know what’s happening at each stage of their project’s development, with a named contact in every department.
2. A flexible approach to publishing: open access, colour images, multiple languages – we will explore various format options to find the best fit for each project.
3. Adapting to address academic needs: we now publish every monograph as a paperback within two years of the hardback release, ensuring our scholarship is accessible and affordable.
4. Producing the highest-quality scholarship: all EUP research undergoes a rigorous peer-review process to gain insightful feedback, inspire discussion and strengthen projects before publication.
5. Collaborating to reach a global audience: we work with international sales teams, ebook partners, librarians and bookshops to guarantee our research is discoverable and makes an impact all over the world.
- This year we’ll be reintroducing some of our bestselling gems from the archive that have made a lasting impact on research and teaching. Here are 10 of our favourites:
- Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents. Edited by Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane A. Goldman and Olga Taxidou
- The Cultural Politics of Emotion. By Sara Ahmed
- Introducing Sociolinguistics. By Rajend Mesthrie, Joan Swann, Ana Deumert and William Leap
- Assemblage Theory. By Manuel DeLanda
- The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives. By Carole Hillenbrand
- From Pictland to Alba, 789-1070. By Alex Woolf
- Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past: The Caribbean Connection. Edited by Tom M. Devine
- Film Genre: Hollywood and Beyond. By Barry Langford
- Scottish Education. Edited by T. G. K. Bryce, W. M. Humes, D. Gillies and A. Kennedy
- The End of the Roman Republic 146 to 44 BC: Conquest and Crisis. By Catherine Steel
- 35 bottles of prosecco – the amount we expect to imbibe during our 70th birthday summer party (a glass must be raised for every year – plus some for luck obviously!).
So what does our future hold? Over to Nicky and Sarah, our heads of editorial for books and journals:
‘Our books programme continues to go from strength to strength: we’ll be publishing around 250 new books next year across our 9 subject areas, and our team of 8 commissioning editors will be working hard to bring another 300 or so new authors into the EUP family. Highlights for the next year include The Edinburgh Companion to the Gothic and the Arts, the beautifully-illustrated Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River, an edition of Walter Scott’s Shorter Poems and a revamped edition of our classic text The Making of Classical Edinburgh.’ – Nicola Ramsey, Head of Books
‘Our journals list continues to expand and is now approaching 50 titles. We are delighted to launch two new journals in 2020: Crime Fiction Studies, which fills a much-needed gap in crime fiction as an academic subject area and supports our expansive list in Literary Studies, and Global Energy Law & Sustainability, an international journal dedicated to research in energy law and policy which boosts our Law offering.’ – Sarah McDonald, Head of Journals
And we at BooksfromScotland raise a glass to another 70 years!
In the latest feature in our Translation as Conversation strand, in association with A Year of Conversation, we asked Allan Cameron of Vagabond Voices to write about his thoughts on literature in translation. Vagabond Voices are an independent publisher at the vanguard in bringing literature from around the world to readers in the UK.
When the title of a blog post looks like a question, it’s really an announcement that you’re about to be enlightened in the manner of Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? There will be a bit of that, as we believe in translated novels, having published a good number of them and many more are on their way. Be assured that translation doesn’t allow for certainty, and I am still uncertain about it even after having worked in the sector for decades.
Why should you read a translated novel, when there are so many good ones written in English? Surely a translation is never as good as the original? Good questions, and I understand their weight. Translation, particularly literary translation, is impossible, and this is truer of poetry than it is of prose. The fundamental problem is that languages don’t just do things differently; they see things differently. Language is a process of categorisation, not only of vocabulary but also of grammar – not only of nouns and adjectives, but also of verbs and their tenses, and these can be done in any manner of ways. Kivunjo, which is spoken in Kenya and Tanzania, has tenses that refer the action of a verb to today, earlier today, yesterday, no earlier than yesterday, yesterday or earlier, the remote past, the habitual, the ongoing, the consecutive, the hypothetical, the future, an indeterminate time and the occasional. Most East Asian languages have no commonly used tenses.
In a sociolinguistic experiment, a group of English speakers and a group of Indonesian speakers were asked to pair off two out of three pictures, the first of which showed a man (A) kicking a ball, the second the same man (A) about to kick a ball, and the third a different man (B) kicking a ball. Most of the English speakers paired off the two different men (A and B) both kicking the ball, and most of the Indonesians paired off the same man (A) kicking the ball and about to kick the ball. These extraordinary results would appear to reflect the different tense usage in the two languages. English has a clearly defined tense usage, and generally Indonesian doesn’t. Language affects the way we perceive time and action, but it does much more – often in more subtle ways that would defy such experimentation.
Languages come with different literary histories and cultural references, and if a language is spoken in more than one country, these can change within a language. Languages provide different tools and are more or less adept at particular tones. Rhyme can be easy in some languages and difficult in others. Where it has a very limited number, as in English, it can often sound stilted and forced, whereas in other languages the poet can use it at will and make a purely aesthetic judgement. The mechanisms of humour are perhaps the most varied element between languages, and comedy, rather than tragedy, is difficult to write and often impossible to translate.
I’m not arguing my case very well, you may think, but one reason why translation is so important is precisely the huge obstacles that lie in its way. The history of literature is the history of translation: Roman letters became what we know them to have been, because of the Greeks; European vernacular literature was influenced by Latin and for many centuries lived alongside it; the influence of Italian on European literature led to such figures as Shakespeare and Cervantes; French dominated in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while English is now a global power. Influence does not always follow power: the Greeks were defeated by Rome, but managed to persuade their conquerors that Greek culture was superior, and Brythonic tales from Wales, Cornwall and Brittany were translated into French and from France around Europe.
Literatures are at their best when they have an ear for what other literatures are doing. English literature in the nineteenth century was harmed by its insularity, almost certainly due its supreme power at the time. There were exceptions: George Eliot, who translated from German, was the only writer to adopt new techniques such as free indirect discourse (often referred to by the German term, erlebte Rede, not introduced into English until the 1920s), and Robert Louis Stevenson started his career with Travels with a Donkey, a travelogue in Provence, and finished it with his extraordinary and innovative South Sea Tales – neither of these are strictly translations, but they definitely are in the etymological sense of “transferring across”, from one culture to another.
Readers may feel underwhelmed; haven’t they read their Tolstoys and Flauberts? Aren’t most translations of a poor quality? It is not the case that the classics are always well translated, and yet they’re so powerful that, though diminished, they manage to hold their position. Equally many minor works are well translated and perhaps even improved upon. When it comes to choosing translated novels, careful browsing does pay dividends, and if there are more than one translation of the same work in the bookshop, you can discover much about what translation involves. Translators are not paid a fortune and may be working against the clock, as do writers and journalists, but readers looking for variety may find substandard work little more than an irritant, as the taste of another unfamiliar world compensates for it. However, if we can define what a good translation is, we’ll also understand what a translation is.
Translations introduce readers to the many ways we can set about literature. Seemingly new techniques and plot devices can be striking, though they may be common in the original language. Cultural autarky is sterile, and the Anglosphere is in danger of falling into that trap. A translation can be informative about how other peoples live, and it teaches us about the other. It has a humanistic influence, which has outcomes in those many countries where translation is common (Italy publishes around 25% of its books in translation, France around 20% and Germany somewhere in the teens, whilst it is around 3% in the English-speaking world). Could we build Europe without translation? Probably not. Translation’s main purpose, however, is to increase the provision of good literature, so a good translation has to read as though it had been written in English (not contaminated by the source language’s syntax), and yet it must retain as much as possible of the original’s cultural difference, which is the main thing translation brings to the reading experience. This is not easy. This is yet another impossibility in translation, but it’s something translators should strive for.
Who benefits from translation? Most governments see it as the means to export their own cultures, and consequently subsidise foreign publication of their literature. This is good for their writers, who earn more money and enjoy the odd trip abroad – a significant benefit and a cultural exchange – but the culture of the target language is, I think, the greatest beneficiary, because the translated literature it consumes will broaden its understanding of literature and of the world.
When giving talks on translation, I often ask, “Is translation an exercise in uncertainty or an obstacle to communication?” It is both of course, and the miscommunications also have their usefulness, because the target culture adds meanings not originally intended in the source culture. The whole process is about judgement where there’s a degree of uncertainly, and translation is not unique in this, but this is uniquely essential to what translation is about. For practitioners, translation is an excellent apprenticeship in writing, because it teaches them as much about their own language as it does about the language they’re translating from. It teaches them about the strengths and limitations of both languages. Every human language is deficient. During Q&As, someone asked me if this could be said of English too. The question told its own story, and of course English is deficient, and translators into English from different languages will notice different deficiencies. English is no different from any other language in its uniqueness, its commonality, its strengths and its weaknesses.
“Literary novel” is not a term that I like. It used to be called the novel, but that term is now the domain of genre, the formatted novel. The distinction is not clear-cut, many good writers having switched to genre in order to survive as writers. The literary novel is consequently defined by what it is not, but I would like to emphasise what it is: a novel whose secrets cannot be guessed at until it has been read, because it’s innovative, often elegant in prose style, and concerned with issues of importance which only it can analyse in an open manner leaving readers to make what they want of it. As with all definitions in the arts, this definition is not exhaustive nor can it be. In Britain, the literary novel does not sell well and perhaps never has compared with other European countries. It is difficult for publishers to continue to publish them and remain solvent, and that is a problem for young writers. A distressing one, if we care about our literary culture in Scotland and in the wider English-speaking community.
If it is headache to cover costs when publishing literary novels originally written in English, it is an eternal migraine to do so when they’ve been translated into our language. We often receive praise – from both readers and publishing colleagues – for taking on the difficult but worthwhile task of translation. What may not be obvious to those who praise us, however, is that we are in a precarious place with our translated literary fiction, and if we don’t start covering our costs soon (let alone making a profit), we’ll have to drop our translations altogether and focus instead on what sustains us: our literary novels, poetry and political polemics written in original English.
If it were simply a matter of finding better books to translate, that’d be one thing, but even high-quality translated fiction can be difficult to sell. As an example, our accountant recently enquired about a “hole” in our accounts related to a particular translated novel that had lost us money. That novel was Lars Sund’s remarkable masterpiece, A Happy Little Island. A Happy Little Island is a staff favourite. It’s beautifully translated by Peter Graves, and perhaps even more important, it’s relevant, as it explores a small island’s response when dead bodies begin washing ashore, with no identification and no one to claim them. Of course we are aware that many fantastic books don’t receive the recognition they deserve. But the issue we wish to bring to light here is that we – and surely other small publishers of translated literary fiction – cannot keep producing translations if no one is buying them.
Our hope is that if people know that small publishers are struggling to sell translations, perhaps they’ll be more inclined to purchase a few. In the age of crowdfunding and other appeals, it is more acceptable to be a little self-serving, but obviously it is not just our own translated novels that have to be read! There are a small number of usually very small publishers trying to turn the tide, and they are all worthy of your custom and support, but we could suggest that Vagabond Voices would not be a bad place to start.
Wait, I’m going to be even more self-serving: if you want to know more about the importance of diversity of languages and dialects, the diversity of language within a language (registers and argots) and even lingua francas (they too have a role, though the predominance of English over the other lingua francas is a danger to our linguistic ecology), you could read my own work on this related subject, In Praise of the Garrulous.
Vagabond Voices have a dedicated website on issues of translation with plenty more insightful and interesting blogs and podcasts. Find out more at Think in Translation: https://www.vagabondvoices.co.uk/think-in-translation-home.
You can purchase Vagabond Voices books in translation on their website https://www.vagabondvoices.co.uk/.
This weekend we take to the streets to celebrate #Pride2019, and there are some brilliant books out there to read when you’re done marching. BooksfromScotland has gathered together books with LGBT voices, authors and stories, with a bit weirdness and witchcraft thrown in!
From the diverse collection of titles published right here in Scotland we have spotted:
We Were Always Here – A Queer Words Anthology edited by Ryan Vance and Michael Lee Richardson (404 Ink)
From drag queens and discos, to black holes and monsters, these stories and poems wrestle with love and loneliness and the fight to be seen.
Amateur – A Reckoning With Gender, Identity and Masculinity, Thomas Page McBee (Canongate)
An exploration of modern masculinity by the first transgender man to box at Madison Square Garden, shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize.
Girl Meets Boy, Ali Smith (Canongate)
Ali Smith’s remix of Ovid’s most joyful metamorphosis is a story about the kind of fluidity that can’t be bottled and sold. It is about girls and boys, girls and girls, love and transformation, a story of puns and doubles, reversals and revelations. Funny and fresh, poetic and political, here is a tale of change for the modern world.
Queer Bloomsbury edited by Brenda S. Helt, Madelyn Detloff (EUP)
This anthology presents fifteen wide-ranging readings that trace the cultural, ideological and aesthetic facets of the Bloomsbury Group’s development as a queer subculture.
Becoming Dangerous edited by Katie West and Jasmine Elliot (Fiction & Feeling)
A non-fiction book of deeply personal essays by marginalised people operating at the intersection of feminism, witchcraft, and resistance to summon power and become fearsome in a world that would prefer them afraid. With contributions from twenty witchy femmes, queer conjurers, and magical rebels.
China in Drag: Travels with a Cross-dresser, Michael Bristow (Sandstone Press)
Approaching the end of his eight-year stay in Beijing, Michael Bristow decided he wanted to write about the country’s modern history. To assist him he asked for the help of his language teacher, who was born just two years after the communist party came to power in 1949. It came as a surprise though, to learn that the teacher was also a cross-dresser. The teacher’s story is the story of modern China.
Expecting: The Inner Life of Pregnancy, Chitra Ramaswamy (Saraband)
When Chitra Ramaswamy discovered she was pregnant, she longed for a book that went above and beyond a manual; a book that did more than describe what was happening in her growing body. One that, instead, got to the very heart of this overwhelming, confusing and exciting experience.
Sonny and Me, Ross Sayers (Cranachan Publishing – Young Adult)
When Daughter and Sonny’s favourite teacher leaves unexpectedly, they decide to investigate. As they dig deeper into the staff at Battlefield High, they discover a dark secret which one person will kill to protect… Will they uncover the truth without being expelled? Can their friendship survive when personal secrets are revealed?
Amphibian, Christina Neuwirth (Speculative Books)
It’s summer in Edinburgh. Rose Ellis arrives at MoneyTownCashGrowth one morning to find that the entire fourth floor has been flooded with water, in a desperate attempt to improve productivity. As the water steadily rises, her working situation becomes more and more absurd…
Tonguit, Harry Giles (Stewed Rhubarb)
Politically radical and formally inventive, Tonguit plays at the borders of nationality and sexuality with irreverent affection, questing through languages for a place to speak.
Goblin, Ever Dundas (Saraband)
Set during the Blitz and the London riots of 2011, Goblin tells the story of “an iconic protagonist” with “a powerful imaginative force”. An outsider, the titular Goblin uses the power of imagination to help her navigate and survive in a cruel world, even to find a desperate kind of joy.
Ever Fallen in Love, Zoe Strachan (Sandstone Press)
Richard fell for Luke at university. Luke was handsome, dissolute, dangerous; together they did things that Richard has spent the last decade trying to forget. Zoe Strachan takes us on a journey through hedonistic student days to the lives we didn’t expect to end up living, and the hopes and fears that never quite leave us.
The Cutting Room, Louise Welsh (Canongate)
When Rilke, a dissolute and promiscuous auctioneer, comes across a collection of highly disturbing photographs during a house clearance he feels compelled to unearth more about the deceased owner who coveted them.
And beyond the Scottish publishing scene there are more brilliant LGBT stories from Scottish writers to keep you busy:
Trumpet, Jackie Kay (Picador)
This novel is centred on jazz player Joss Moody. His trumpeting has made him famous, but after his death a fact emerges: he was a woman. Kay deals sensitively with race and gender, adoption and inheritance, to create a vivid portrayal of love.
Wain: LGBT Reimaginings of Scottish Folk Tales, Rachel Plummer (The Emma Press)
Wain is a collection of LGBT themed poetry for teens based on retellings of Scottish myths. The collection contains stories about kelpies, selkies, and the Loch Ness Monster, alongside perhaps lesser-known mythical people and creatures, such as wulvers, Ghillie Dhu, and the Cat Sìth. These poems immerse readers in an enriching, diverse and enchanting vision of contemporary life.
Maggie & Me, Damian Barr (Bloomsbury)
A touching and darkly witty memoir about surviving Thatcher’s Britain. It’s a story of growing up gay in a straight world and coming out the other side in spite of, and maybe because of, the iron lady.
The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales, Kirsty Logan (Salt)
These stories feature clockwork hearts, lascivious queens, paper men, island circuses, and a flooded world; some are radical retellings of classic stories, some are modern-day fables, but all explore substitutions for love.
The Mermaids Singing, Val McDermid (HarperCollins)
You always remember the first time. Isn’t that what they say about sex? How much more true it is of murder. A tense, beautifully written psychological thriller, The Mermaids Singing explores the tormented mind of a serial killer unlike any the world of fiction has ever seen.
The Wages of Sin, Kaite Welsh (Tinder Press)
Sarah Gilchrist has fled from London to Edinburgh in disgrace and is determined to become a doctor, despite the misgivings of her family and Victorian society. Sarah finds herself drawn into Edinburgh’s dangerous underworld of bribery, brothels and body snatchers – and a confrontation with her own past.
Collected Poems, Edwin Morgan (Carcanet)
Edwin Morgan’s wonderful transforming imagination is democratic, generous and inclusive. Even the sonnet form becomes a new experiment for a poet of questing and anarchic vision, unwilling to rest on rules. An absolute must-have for every bookshelf.
For children’s titles the Scottish Book Trust have pulled together a lovely list of picture books.
We are used to Historic Environment Scotland bringing us the most beautifully-produced books, with fantastic images, and their latest book is no exception. Let us share a little bit of those treasures that you will find inside.
The Honours of Scotland: The Story of the Scottish Crown Jewels & The Stone of Destiny
By Chris Tabraham
Published by Historic Environment Scotland
On 4 February 1818, a distinguished group of men gathered on the stair outside the Crown Room in Edinburgh Castle. Standing beside the Lord President of the Court of Session, the Lord Justice Clerk, the Lord Chief Commissioner of the Jury Court, the Lord Provost of the City of Edinburgh and the Commander-in-Chief of the Army was an anxious Walter Scott, one of Scotland’s foremost authors and antiquarians. His urgent pleas to the Prince Regent (the future King George IV) had resulted in a royal warrant permitting Scott to accompany the Scottish Officers of State to open the sealed Crown Room in search of the Scottish Crown, Sceptre and Sword of State, known as the Honours of Scotland. The group watched in silence as the masonry blocking was removed from the doorway. In the darkness beyond they spied a great iron-bound oak chest. They approached with great apprehension, for there was a suspicion that the chest was empty. The Honours had been locked away in 1707 following the Treaty of Union with England but many believed that ceremony had been a hoax.
Let Walter Scott himself describe what then happened:
‘The chest seemed to return a hollow and empty sound to the strokes of the hammer, and even those whose expectations had been most sanguine felt at the moment the probability of disappointment … The joy was therefore extreme when, the ponderous lid of the chest being forced open, the Regalia were discovered lying at the bottom covered with linen cloths, exactly as they had been left in the year 1707 … The reliques were passed from hand to hand, and greeted with the affectionate reverence which emblems so venerable, restored to public view after the slumber of more than a hundred years, were so peculiarly calculated to excite. The discovery was instantly communicated to the public by the display of the Royal Standard, and was greeted by shouts of the soldiers in the garrison, and a vast multitude assembled on the Castle Hill; indeed the rejoicing was so general and sincere as plainly to show that, however altered in other respects, the people of Scotland had lost nothing of that national enthusiasm which formerly had displayed itself in grief for the loss of these emblematic Honours, and now was expressed in joy for their recovery.’
No one can have been more overjoyed than Scott himself. And the drama of that February morning proved a fitting climax to the fascinating and eventful story of the Honours of the Kingdom, a story which begins in the Dark Ages, takes us through the glory of Scotland’s medieval history and reaches right up to the present day, with the Honours on display in Edinburgh Castle’s Crown Room.
The Crown of Scotland was first worn by James V in 1540, and is still taken to Holyrood for the State Opening of the Scottish Parliament every four years.
The Sceptre, created in Renaissance Italy and given to James IV by the Pope, was remodelled during the reign of his son, James V.
Main gate of Edinburgh Castle photographed from the esplanade. Edinburgh Castle is not only the modern home of the Honours – the Crown Room was created around 1615. The Crown Room was where they were sealed up following the Act of Union, only to be dramatically rediscovered.
One of the two padlocks broken as the oak chest was forced open to reveal the Honours, which had been hidden away for over one hundred years.
The Honours of Scotland: The Story of the Scottish Crown Jewels & The Stone of Destiny by Chris Tabraham is published by Historic Environment Scotland, priced £9.99
Canongate’s latest fiction release, My Name is Monster by debutant Katie Hale is influenced by two of literature’s heavyweight classics. Kristian Kerr finds that it is a novel that uses its influences in an enjoyable and exciting way.
My Name Is Monster
By Katie Hale
Published by Canongate
Monster is shipwrecked on the island of Great Britain, a designation purely geographical, referring to the landmass that comprises England, Scotland, and Wales. There is nothing Great about it. The landscape has witnessed the disintegration of the world humans have wrought, in an all-too-plausible scenario: competition over resources destroyed the world economy, the War brought dirty bombs and the Sickness. Monster is only alive because her longing for isolation took her to work at the Seed Vault, a repository in the Arctic circle. She begins the business of survival in this depopulated land, salvaging what she can from her small boat and heading south. Beset by hunger, cold, fatigue, she scavenges her way towards familiar territory and begins to establish a life.
Katie Hale’s debut novel, My Name Is Monster, is partly inspired by two classic novels, Robinson Crusoe and Frankenstein and, therefore, is freighted with quite some literary baggage. It doesn’t bend under this weight, I’m pleased to find, for Hale has produced a book that combines a post-apocalyptic setting, a fascinating and resourceful protagonist, and a tight, tense plot that ticks, or, as we should rather say, tickerts along. This exploration of isolation and resilience, language and power, feels thoroughly modern and, aside from the name Monster itself, the novel wears its antecedents lightly.
Hale has not attempted a point-by-point reworking of Defoe and Shelley’s novels, and My Name Is Monster is the stronger for it. Certainly, characteristics typical of a re-boot may be discerned: the shipwreck washing up on the shores of post-everything Britain inverts Robinson Crusoe’s colonialism. The setting is a deliberately female and feminist world. The novel shares with Crusoe a relentless focus on the collecting or making of objects necessary for survival (food, tools, clothing), offering a critique of the genre’s precisely three-hundred-year partnership with consumer capitalism and drawing it forcibly to a close. Hale’s Man-Friday moment, though, is a game-changer that leaves Defoe in its dust.
In early chapters, Monster repeatedly professes her desire for solitude, claiming not to mind the isolation per se. She longed to be alone as a child, to fulfil a compelling need and ambition, to ‘shut out all the noise, make my mind go still enough to explore, to experiment with circuits and motors and cogs, to create. … I would become an inventor, left alone in a lab or workshop to develop my brilliant ideas, to bring my new creations into being. The logical complexities of objects, set apart from human inconsistency.’ Young Monster is a proto-Victor Frankenstein, a collector of plugs, and mechanical fragments from which she draws solace. Yet in this new world, having achieved total isolation, she finds her creative drive thwarted: ‘there is nothing to create, and nobody to create it for. There is only survival, a continuous plateau of existence’ – until, that is, there isn’t, and things get really interesting.
That name, ‘Monster’ is a play on the afterlife of Mary Shelley’s novel and the infamous slippage of the name ‘Frankenstein’ from creator to creature. As such, it underlines the productively loose relationship between Hale’s novel and its 200-year-old predecessor, which casts Monster as both enthusiastic scientist and lonely progeny, both a creator and a creature.
In the novel’s tense central, pivotal scene, Monster encounters a feral girl in the boarded-up corner shop she had been using as a store cupboard. She describes, in a reversal of previous declarations, her breathlessness at the ‘simple beauty of another human face, the unexpected ecstasy of touch’ but the climactic, transformative moment is brought about through language. ‘I use my free hand to point to myself. Monster, I am about to say – but what if she recognises the word and is afraid? Instead, I think of the most comforting and caring word I can. I point to myself and say, “Mother.”’ By changing her name in this instinctive but unforeshadowed gesture of protection, Monster transforms herself into a different kind of creator. Becoming Mother to this new Monster she bestows language on the girl, binding them together in an imperfect relationship that is sustained by will, generosity, the careful disclosure and withholding of information, and a kind of love not betokened by Monster’s earliest self-narration.
In depicting this coming together of two traumatized people, Hale handles the different voices of these two women deftly, all the time drawing attention to the words they share and the words they don’t. Neither is passionately eloquent, as Shelley’s creature taught himself to be, but their (and Hale’s) careful attentiveness to words and silence combines to make a novel that is exquisitely paced. Time’s passing is marked in the silence between the ticks of a broken clock and the blank space on the page between the novel’s mostly short chapters, as the story and the reader is drawn inexorably on.
My Name is Monster is published within weeks of another Frankenstein novel, Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein: A Love Story (Jonathan Cape). The two wear their connections to Shelley in near-opposite ways. Winterson’s is a virtuosic re-telling of the novel’s famous composition story (the creation parable’s creation myth, if you like) paralleled by the developing romance between young transgender doctor Ry Shelley and AI academic Victor Stein. Artfully constructed, it fizzes with winks and nods across centuries of scientific progress speculating on the challenges for gender, sexuality, and individual liberty posed by accelerated evolution, reanimation and artificial intelligence.
With its interweaving of environmental, social, and political catastrophe into a story so tightly focused on just two consciousnesses, My Name Is Monster stops progress in its tracks to ponder the nature of humanity’s original technologies, speech and feeling. This is a novel at its most powerful when dealing with those subjects, when the conventional trappings of the post-apocalypse are stripped away, a trait that bodes well for Hale’s future as a novelist.
My Name Is Monster by Katie Hale is published by Canongate, priced £16.99
Scotland’s long distance Ways have been a mainstay for tourists and residents for a long time, and the resurgence of pilgrim trails is a welcome addition for those interested in the landscape and history of Scotland. In July, The Fife Pilgrim Way opens, and here we share an extract from the guide to the trail, brought to us by Birlinn Ltd.
Extract taken from The Fife Pilgrim Way: In the Footsteps of Monks, Miners and Martyrs
By Ian Bradley
Published by Birlinn Ltd
Fife was long known as the pilgrim kingdom. This is because within its bounds were found the two most important places of pilgrimage in medieval Scotland, Dunfermline (which was also the residence of successive Scottish monarchs – hence the kingdom designation) and St Andrews. At the height of the pilgrimage boom in the Middle Ages, thousands of people from many parts of the British Isles and beyond traversed Fife to venerate the shrines of St Margaret and St Andrew. In the words of the medieval historian Tom Turpie, ‘The economy, communication networks, landscape and religious and cultural life of Fife, perhaps more than any other region of medieval Scotland, was shaped by the presence of pilgrims and the veneration of saints’ (Turpie 2016: 4).
The Fife Pilgrim Way, officially opened in July 2019, allows modern pilgrims to follow in the wake of their medieval predecessors and walk, cycle or otherwise make their way across Fife towards St Andrews on a route that has two starting points on the northern shores of the Firth of Forth: Culross, with its associations with two early Scottish saints, and North Queensferry, where Queen Margaret established the ferry crossing for pilgrims going to St Andrews. It is based on the premise that following in the footsteps of medieval pilgrims across Fife is a great way to discover the region’s remarkable past, its lively modern communities, countryside, historic towns and natural treasures. But it is much more than an exercise in historical reconstruction. For a start, it does not follow the route taken by most medieval pilgrims who would have gone directly north from Kelty to Loch Leven and travelled on via Scotlandwell, taking a more northerly course. The modern pilgrim way has been deliberately routed through old mining and industrial areas of West Fife and the new town of Glenrothes. This is partly in the hope of bringing economic and other benefits to places which have experienced decline and do not see many visitors or tourists, as has happened in Galicia in Spain, the site of Europe’s most famous pilgrim way, the Camino de Santiago, which leads to the shrine of St James.
There is also a conscious desire that those journeying along the Fife Pilgrim Way will not only see pretty vistas and affluent villages, but also come into contact with places and people that have not been so favoured. King James VI of Scotland (later King James I of England) famously described Fife as ‘a beggar’s mantle fringed with gold’. The golden coastal fringe, with its quaint fishing villages and breathtaking views across the Forth, has long been the route of a hugely popular walk developed and maintained by Fife Coast and Countryside Trust.
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The practice of pilgrimage, understood as a departure from daily life on a journey with a spiritual intention, and often – although not invariably – to a destination with a religious significance, is a central feature of all the world’s major faiths. It is not obligatory for Christians but it has long been a significant aspect of Christian life and devotion. Jesus sent out his disciples to preach the kingdom of God and to heal, telling them to go from house to house, taking nothing on their journey. Some early Christians, like the Celtic monks who wandered across continental Europe as well as around the remoter shores of the British Isles, took to almost perpetual pilgrimage as a demanding form of witness and exiled themselves from home comforts as they sought to follow the Son of Man who had nowhere to lay his head. The desire to walk in Jesus’ footsteps led other early Christians to journey to the Holy Land. As the cult of saints developed and certain places came to be seen as especially sacred, Christian pilgrimage reached its zenith in the Middle Ages, with thousands travelling for many months across Europe to Rome, Santiago, St Andrews, Dunfermline and other shrines associated with apostles, saints and martyrs.
Pilgrimage effectively ceased in Scotland with the Reformation. In fact, there is considerable evidence that St Andrews was in significant decline as a pilgrim destination fifty years or so before Protestantism was officially established in 1560. For the next 400 years and more pilgrimage and pilgrim places largely disappeared across Scotland as they did across the whole of Protestant Europe. The Reformers had good and understandable reasons for attacking the practice of pilgrimage, which had become associated with the buying and selling of indulgences and the idea of paying your way into heaven. The result was that pilgrimage became almost a dirty word in Scotland, at least in Presbyterian circles.
In the last three or four decades something remarkable has happened. There has been a widespread and striking revival of interest in the practice of pilgrimage across Europe. Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, given its reputation for Presbyterian disapproval of the more Catholic practices of the Middle Ages, Scotland is in the van of this movement, with more new pilgrim routes being created here than in any other part of the United Kingdom. Significant initiatives across the country have been stimulated by a combination of local enthusiasm and support from the Scottish Government and local authorities keen to promote health, well-being and economic regeneration, as well as revived interest in local saints, and the Scottish Pilgrim Routes Forum’s efforts to bring together interested parties within churches, heritage groups and the tourism sector. Lingering Presbyterian unease has at last been put to rest, not least by a spectacular vote of confidence at the 2017 General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, which passed with acclamation a deliverance from its Church and Society Council affirming the place of pilgrimage within the life of the Church and encouraging congregations to explore opportunities for pilgrimage locally and the provision of practical and spiritual support for pilgrims passing through their parishes.
The Fife Pilgrim Way is one of six major walking and cycling pilgrimage routes currently being developed across Scotland by steering groups made up of local enthusiasts, churches, voluntary bodies and local authorities. Many of these volunteers represent member organisations of the Scottish Pilgrim Routes Forum, a national network set up in 2012 and a fully constituted Scottish charity which supports and facilitates the work of the steering groups and meets twice a year in locations closely associated with their work. The most ambitious of the new pilgrim ways will be a 185-mile coast-to-coast route linking Iona and St Andrews, two of Scotland’s most iconic religious sites and places of medieval pilgrimage. The second longest, initially created in 2013 by a group of enthusiasts from Paisley Abbey, is the 149-mile Whithorn Way from Glasgow to Whithorn, once the site of a major cathedral associated with St Ninian and an important place of pilgrimage since the seventh century. The 72-mile Forth to Farne Way, linking North Berwick to Lindisfarne, opened in 2017. In north-east Scotland, the 40-mile Deeside Way follows the route of the old railway track between Aberdeen and Ballater. The most northerly of the new pilgrimage routes is the St Magnus Way, a 55-mile walking trail across mainland Orkney from Evie to Kirkwall, opened in 2017 to mark the 900th anniversary of the martyrdom of Orkney’s patron saint. The development of these six routes represents the beginning of a longterm strategy co-ordinated by the Scottish Pilgrim Routes Forum to create opportunities for local people and overseas visitors alike to learn from and experience Scotland’s rich pilgrimage heritage through the outdoor environment.
The Fife Pilgrim Way: In the Footsteps of Monks, Miners and Martyrs by Ian Bradley is published by Birlinn Ltd, priced £14.99
Wild and Majestic: Romantic Visions of Scotland, the summer exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland (26 June–10 November 2019), tells the fascinating story of how tartan, bagpipes and rugged, wild landscapes became established as enduring, internationally recognised symbols of Scottish identity and how Scotland became established in the popular imagination as a land of wilderness, heroism and history.
Wild and Majestic: Romantic Visions of Scotland
by Patrick Watt and Rosie Waine
Published by NMS Enterprises
The exhibition spans the period from the final defeat of the Jacobites at the Battle of Culloden in 1746 to the death of Queen Victoria in 1901. In exploring the efforts made to preserve and revive Highland traditions in the wake of post-Jacobite persecution, depopulation and rapid socio-economic change, it will show how Scotland’s relationship with the European Romantic movement transformed external perceptions of the Highlands and was central to the birth of tourism in Scotland.
Uniform of the Balmoral Highlanders c.1903, National Museums Scotland
Over 300 objects will be on display, many of them showcased in this souvenir guide, drawn from the collections of National Museums Scotland and thirty-eight lenders across the UK.
Throughout the exhibition, the influence of Gaelic language and culture, and the impact of these developments on it will be shown through objects, text and film. This is reflected in the book.
The objects tell a story with a stellar cast, including King George IV, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Burns, JMW Turner, Henry Raeburn, Felix Mendelssohn, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Ludwig Van Beethoven, Lord Byron, whose 1807 poem Lachin y Gair (Lochnagar) is quoted in the exhibition’s title, and the Ossian author-translator James Macpherson.
From the late 18th century, visitors were drawn to Scotland in increasing numbers, attracted to locations depicted in romantic paintings, prints and literature. Many artists, writers and musicians visited, often on personal pilgrimages inspired by the lasting influence of Ossian, or the fame of Burns, Sir Walter Scott and others.
Works by major figures, including Wordsworth, Turner and Mendelssohn – all of whom met with Scott during their travels – inspired more people to seek out for themselves the places evoked in music, art and literature. Dorothy Wordsworth’s travel journal, Mendelssohn’s sketchbook and his original score of the Hebrides Overture, and a silver urn gifted from Byron to Scott after the two literary giants met in 1815 all feature in the exhibition.
Backsword belonging to Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany Late 18th century, National Museums Scotland
Through rich displays reflecting the colour and flamboyance of the Highland image, visitors will encounter key developments such as the Ossian controversy, the over-turning of the ban on Highland dress, the pageantry around King George IV’s visit to Edinburgh in 1822, the Highland tourism boom, and the creation of a Romantic idyll for Queen Victoria at Balmoral.
Dr Patrick Watt, exhibition curator, says:
‘This is a contested, complex history, and also a fascinating one. There are competing claims, still, over the extent to which those symbols of Scotland we see today are Romantic inventions, or authentic expressions of an ancient cultural identity.
Using material evidence, we will examine the origins and development of the dress, music, and art that made up the Highland image. We will show how cultural traditions were preserved, idealised and reshaped to suit contemporary tastes against a background of political agendas, and economic and social change.’
Wild and Majestic: Romantic Visions of Scotland by Patrick Watt and Rosie Waine is published by NMS Enterprises, priced £9.99.
Wild and Majestic: Romantic Visions of Scotland, the exhibition, is on at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh 26 June–10 November 2019.
https://www.nms.ac.uk/exhibitions-events/exhibitions/national-museum-of-scotland/wild-and-majestic/
BooksfromScotland is starting a new, regular strand, ‘Rediscovering’, bringing back into focus authors from the past whose books still deserve a spotlight shone on them. We kick off this strand with the hugely talented master of the historical novel, Dorothy Dunnett. This tribute is brought to you by the fine folks of the Dorothy Dunnett Society who are enthusiastically dedicated to promoting Dorothy Dunnett’s great body of work.
“Lymond is back.” So begins The Game of Kings, a dense historical novel by Dorothy Dunnett that became an instant bestseller upon its publication in 1961, inviting readers into the world of the Lymond Chronicles: a sweeping saga of human passion and the slow cogs of history that has enchanted thousands.
These three words proved themselves to be (in a typically Dunnett-esque fashion) a disingenuous herald to the legend she would become. Nonetheless, they represent the first step into the rich and varied world of Dunnett’s spectacular literary corpus of over twenty books—among which are her fifteen volumes of incomparable historical fiction. Fifty-eight years on from its first appearance, The Game of Kings and its successors are still as enthralling, ambitious and relevant as ever. Deftly plotted, bitingly intelligent and passionately felt, they are as dexterous and unique as their creator: Renaissance literature by someone who was truly a Renaissance woman.
Despite creating a literary output that would fill up several normal lifetimes, Dorothy Dunnett lived her public and private lives with equal voracity. Born in Dunfermline in 1923, she was married to celebrated journalist Alastair Dunnett in 1946; worked as a professional portrait painter and sculptor and was an accomplished musician; and provided invaluable public service as a dedicated historical researcher and Scottish heritage advocate. But it is for her historical fiction that she is best remembered, beginning with those three fateful words: Lymond is back.
The Lymond Chronicles are a series of six books beginning in 1547 and recounting the exploits of Francis Crawford of Lymond, a Scottish nobleman-turned-outlaw who is as notorious as he is intelligent and as dangerous as he is coveted. Drawn over the course of the books from France to Malta to Istanbul to Russia, it is nonetheless Scotland that remains his true home. Surrounding him and his homeland (poised on the edge of political collapse) is a cast of magnificent, vicious and vulnerable characters, and an intricate web of plots and machinations that loom over the gameboard of Renaissance Europe.
Despite being Dunnett’s first novel, The Game of Kings pulls no punches, immediately launching the reader into the captivating world of the enigmatic Francis Crawford. To date, the Lymond books remain her most popular, imbued with their protagonist’s stubborn refusal to simply fade away. The series contains what are some of the finest and most dramatic moments in literature, such as a real-life chess game in which humans are used as pieces with deadly consequences—or a night-time race across the rooftops of Blois—or what is an honest-to-god sixteenth-century race-against-the-clock bomb-defusal. From the deceptively simple words of her opening gambit, Dunnett lays the stage for an intricate game of politics and passion into which the reader is thrust headlong. But if first-time readers are left blinking in stupefaction by the complexity of Dunnett’s creation, they only have to read on to be slowly but completely absorbed by Lymond’s story.
Dunnett went on to write King Hereafter: a monumental standalone novel about Earl Thorfinn of Orkney, whom she believed she could prove to be the real-life figure behind Shakespeare’s distorted Macbeth. Thorfinn, like Lymond before him, is a contradictory hero: a legendary figure of epic proportions tempered with all-too-human passions and failings.
After completing King Hereafter (and taking occasional breaks to dip into the delightful world of bifocal-wearing detective and portrait-painter Johnson Johnson) she embarked on a new series, The House of Niccolò series, set this time in the late fifteenth century. She weaves a colourful tapestry, detailing a quarter of a century fraught with double-dealing, vicious battles on a variety of scales, feuding dynasties and convoluted family trees. At its heart is a hero as brilliant and flawed as his predecessors: Nicholas vander Poele—polyglot, mathematician, adventurer, and charismatic leader of men (and women!)—who rises from the dye-yards of Bruges to the heights of Renaissance trade and intrigue.
Perhaps it is no surprise that an author of such unique literary talent and vision should remain unmatched in the fifty-odd years since her first appearance. Her brilliance lies in her combining of literary skill with the integrity and passion that underlay her depictions of human lives, histories and societies. Her characters hail from a range of backgrounds, cultures, religions and social classes, and the multiplicity of experiences adds a richness of narrative rarely seen elsewhere. With honesty and sincerity of expression she produces some of the finest representations of all facets of identity, with on-the-page LGBTQ+ rep, explorations of mental illness and unflinching social commentary. In a genre where women are so often reduced to wives and collateral damage, her novels are packed full of female characters of intelligence, strength and agency to rival and even surpass their male counterparts.
It is not without reason that the novels of Dorothy Dunnett have gathered such a loyal fanbase over the years, and indeed keep attracting new readers and fans today. Historical fiction is often scorned for being escapist and fanciful—but Dorothy Dunnett is so much more. She embraces the manifold pitfalls and wonders of the genre and makes them her own, and her books, far from being dated, sing with immediacy and relevance. More than fifty years on, they still exemplify the best of what literature has to offer. At the time of writing, her books are being reissued—The Lymond Chronicles and King Hereafter have already made an appearance in long-overdue new editions, and The House of Niccolò is soon to follow. Her dedicated networks of fans have roots in all corners of the world and the internet, and Francis Crawford may soon be making his television debut. Though he has never been absent from his readers’ hearts, Lymond is well and truly back—and if I know him at all, he’s here to stay.
The Dorothy Dunnett Society
Dorothy Dunnett loved talking to her readers, and hearing their views. She set up the Dorothy Dunnett Society to make it easier for readers to keep in touch with each other and share their thoughts. Members around the world receive Whispering Gallery, the Society’s quarterly magazine about all things Dunnett, with articles about the characters and sources as well as the history and art of the times in which the books are set. The Dunnett Weekend is held each April in Scotland, and other Gatherings happen from time to time in many different places. International Dorothy Dunnett Day meetings are held on the second Saturday in November around the world, and are open to non-members too.
Please visit our website to find out more about who we are, what we do and what is happening, and to join a community of like-minded souls who love the books and who love to talk about them whether in person or online: is www.dorothydunnett.org
The Dorothy Dunnett Society is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC030649.
Dorothy Dunnett picture credit: Alison Dunnett
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