THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

In this unique, subversive and intimate hybrid memoir, Katie Goh explores the orange as a means of understanding the world, and herself within it. She covers violence, colonialism, resilience, art and beauty in a book that will make you rethink about the everyday and history’s grand narratives. In this extract, we look at Asia’s influence on art and style in early modern Europe.

 

Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange
By Katie Goh
Published by Canongate

 

Jingdezhen porcelain makers begin catering for the newly wealthy European market. They make shaving mugs and mustard pots and sell them to VOC merchants. But while the Dutch want functional ceramics, they also want their porcelain to look Chinese. One account sent from Batavia, the VOC’s capital in Indonesia, to Taiwan in 1635 lists Europe’s favoured motifs: ‘Chinese persons on foot and on horseback, water, landscapes, pleasure-houses, their boats, birds and animals, all this is well liked in Europe.’ The market for Chinese-looking porcelain is captured in many of Kalf’s paint­ings, such as his Still Life with a Chinese Bowl, Nautilus Cup and Other Objects (1662), which features a relief of Chinese figures in traditional dress affixed to a blue-and-white sugar bowl beside peeled citrus.

Europe does eventually master its own porcelain. Augustus II the Strong, elector of Saxony and king of Poland, desires porcelain with such a burning greed that by his death in 1733, he owns a thirty-five-thousand-piece collection, the largest in Europe. The ruler is a rampant spender on the luxurious, the exotic, and the desirable, so much so that he diagnoses himself with ‘porcelain sickness’, that is not unlike a hunger for citrus. In a letter, he writes: ‘Are you not aware that the same is true for oranges as for porcelain, that once one has the sickness of one or the other, one can never get enough of the things and wishes to have more and more.’12 In 1701, Augustus imprisons the German alchemist Johann Friedrich Böttger, who boasted that he had discovered how to spin gold. Unable to make good on his lie, Böttger instead works on a recipe for the porcelain-sick ruler with the scientist Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus. After four years they finally succeed, and in 1710 they establish a porcelain manufactory in Meissen, which continues to produce porcelain today.

Vienna in Austria, Plymouth in England, and Delft in Holland all begin producing their own porcelain. This is not authentic Jingdezhen porcelain but a cheaper, thinner earth­enware that resembles the imported items. European ceramists interpret Chinese visual culture for themselves, reproducing popular motifs such as dragons, plants, birds, and people, but severed from their original cultural significance.

In the eighteenth century, reinterpretation of East Asian designs by Europeans becomes its own decorative style, called chinoiserie, which expands to encompass furniture, wallpaper, paintings, and architecture. Like the painted sinaasappels in a still life, silks, lacquered furniture, and porcelain in European households are fashionable for what they signify – the exotic. Chinoiserie is a European interpretation – an appropriation of Chinese aesthetics made palatable for western tastes. It is a hybrid aesthetic, a crude creation of China through a European gaze. This reinterpretation of other cultures is not one-way. In Beijing, the Emperor Qianlong commissions Jesuit artists to design eighteenth-century baroque-style European pavilions in Yuanming Yuan, the city’s Summer Palace.

Authenticity is prized high in culture. We want ‘authentic’ food, ‘authentic’ travel, and ‘authentic’ experiences. ‘Authentic’ may as well be synonymous with ‘real.’ But authenticity is a nebulous quality. As the Silk Roads taught us, societies have been exchanging food, ideas, religions, and genetics for thou­sands of years. I wonder when an inauthentic creation becomes a style in its own right. When does Dutch porcelain with its Chinese motifs assimilate into the history of art, not as a cheap version of East Asian ceramics but as its own hybrid visual identity?

Immigration is the hybridising of multiple cultures, as is the mixing of families of different races, nations, and religions. My father using the leftover trimmings of a roast dinner in his Malaysian curries is perfectly inauthentic and perfectly delicious. Immigrants who open restaurants of their national cuisines often transform their cooking to cater to western palates. Chinese, Indian, and Thai takeout restaurants may not be authentic, but in their inauthenticity, something new and hybrid and delightful is created.

Being mixed race is, of course, being a hybrid of two cultures. The language of mixed identity, from the more innocuous – half of this and half of that – to the more insid­ious – the one-drop rule – is loaded with accusations of inauthenticity. I could fill the rest of this book with the offhand comments that have been levelled at my racial iden­tity, but all of them had the same effect: of segmenting me into halves and quarters until my sense of self was almost entirely cut away. During the pandemic’s surge of anti-Asian violence, these voices from the past returned as a whisper in my mind that questioned if I was even Asian enough to have the right to feel this much sorrow.

Looking back now, I see that my childhood obsession with authenticity – and my frustration when I failed to capture what I thought was authenticity in art – was about trying to feel real. Growing up, I felt out of step in a world that was rigidly organised into categories of difference. I was not Asian or White but Other; not Straight or Gay but Other; not British or Irish but Other; not Protestant or Catholic but Other. This third, hybrid identity had no borders and no models to guide me. Now I know and love so many people who live along the spectrum of Other, between what our society considers fixed identities. But I felt alone as a child, and I thought that if I  couldn’t pin myself to one identity, then I did not exist. I felt half finished, half authentic, and half of something else – which really meant that I totalled nothing.

But the world is made of hybrids. Purity is an illusion. We are born of two parents. Even the orange is the offspring of different parents: the mandarin and the pomelo. Art has always taken its inspiration from numerous wells of ideas. A still life is a construction half of imagination, half of reality. A contem­porary ceramist shapes their porcelain after both Chinese and Dutch models. History is too various to offer a single narra­tive. Life is composed of shards of glass, all slotted together to make a mosaic. No one is born complete.

 

Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange by Katie Goh is published by Canongate, priced £16.99.

Emma Cowing’s debut novel The Show Woman is an beautifully-told, action-packed tale of the first all-female circus in Edwardian Britain. BooksfromScotland chatted to her about how the hidden stories from history should be brought out into the open.

 

The Show Woman
By Emma Cowing
Published by Hodder & Stoughton

 

Well done on publishing your debut novel, The Show Woman! How have you enjoyed your journey into publication so far?

Thank you so much! It has been a rollercoaster so far, but very much of the fun kind. I think what has surprised me most is how much of a team effort it is to publish a book. From cover designs to marketing plans, working with my brilliant editor Jo Dickinson at Hodder and the creative input that stretches across the publishing house, there’s so much that goes on behind the scenes to get every book you see in a bookshop on to the shelf. It’s been exciting, and very humbling!

 

What can readers expect from your novel?

Thrills, spills and all the fun of the fair as four young women come together in Edwardian Scotland to create the first all-female circus act. You’ll meet strong female characters striving to make their way in a man’s world, lions, elephants, and an adorable horse named Tommy Pony. At the heart of the story is a long-buried family secret that threatens to tear apart the Ladies Circus for good. You’ll also see quite a bit of Scotland along the way, as the circus travels from Glasgow’s Vinegarhill showground up to Aberdeen during the 1910 summer fair season.

 

The inspiration for The Show Woman came from a family member. Can you tell us more about that?

My great aunt Violet was a trapeze artist and bareback horse rider, and her parents were showpeople who traversed the fairgrounds of Scotland between the 1880s and the 1910s with their travelling theatre. Learning about their lives, partly through official documents (under profession, many of my female family members were described as ‘showwomen’) and partly from the family stories my Mum remembered from her childhood, was hugely inspiring. I knew I had to write about it.

 

Have you inherited any unexpected skill you can share with us?

I am the world’s least flexible person so definitely not the trapeze! However I am musical, as some of my great aunts and uncles were, and as a child played a tiny quarter size violin which was passed down to me from Violet’s brother. My family would also say I quite like telling people what to do, so perhaps, like the character of Lena in The Show Woman, I might be a good ringmistress…

 

Have you always been interested in women’s lives and status in history?

Absolutely. Women are so often relegated to the sidelines of history, and yet when you really delve into it they were front and centre, but their stories remained untold. Part of what drew me to writing about the world of Scottish showpeople is that it is hidden history, and as we know, women’s history itself is often hidden history. Combining those two factors was really interesting to me, and a tale I thought deserved to be told.

 

Other than the women in your family, do you have any other rebellious ladies you take inspiration from?

From Mary Queen of Scots to Agnes Randolph, Scotland has always had its fair share of rebellious women (I absolutely loved Mairi Kidd’s Warriors and Witches and Damn Rebel Bitches which covers this topic beautifully), and I’m always on the lookout for stories of women who dared to challenge the conventions of the day.

For my next novel, which is out in Spring 2026, I’m staying in the Edwardian period but delving into my husband’s family of Italian immigrants as well as the world of London’s Gaiety Theatre, where women took to the stage and became pinups at a time when the notion of celebrity was in its infancy. Most of the action takes place at a country house party on a Scottish island and I’ve had a lot of fun playing with societal structures and stereotypes, and what it meant to lead a fulfilling life as a woman at a time when we still didn’t have the vote. I think I’ll always be drawn to women who are outsiders.

 

Your day job is in journalism, so you’re used to writing to deadline. How was the switch to novel writing where you have more space, but you still have to balance this with structure and momentum?

It was definitely a shift. For a long time I was writing chapters the exact word length of the features I wrote in the day job. It was a bit of a process to understand that I had more freedom in novel writing, that a chapter could be as long or as short as I liked. It was a similar thing with structure and momentum. Once I realised I was in control, that it was my story and I could tell it exactly the way I wanted to, I absolutely revelled in the freedom.

 

What kind of novels do you enjoy reading?

I adore historical fiction, as you might imagine, and recent favourite reads include Kate Foster’s The King’s Witches, Stacey Halls’ The Household, Joanna Miller’s The Eights and Fiza Saeed McLynn’s The Midnight Carousel. All time favourites include The Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard and everything ever written by the peerless Sarah Waters.

 

What has been your favourite read so far this year?

There have been so many (2025 is shaping up to be such a great year for books), but my absolute stand out is Clare Leslie Hall’s Broken Country. A magnificent novel about first loves and heartbreaking loss with the pulse of a thriller. I couldn’t put it down.

 

The Show Woman by Emma Cowing is published by Hodder & Stoughton, priced £16.99.

Inspired by a true story of one Scot’s rise to prominence, Murray Hall is a historical fiction novel that takes the reader to a dazzling turn-of-the-century New York, where the eponymous Hall has a secret that is only revealed after death. In this extract, a journalist determined to discover the truth speaks to one of Murray’s gambling buddies.

 

Murray Hall
By Milo Allan
Published by Black and White

 

Joe Young’s eyes gleamed green in the electric light of the card room. I had remembered them grey, like Hall’s, from our first meeting, but I now saw the depths of them like a briny sea. 

‘Ah take it you know how to play the Widow. Thirty-one? It’s a simple game but it was one of Murray’s favourites. Better to play with three or four, but we can play it fine enough with two.’ 

A pack of cards danced between his hands, fluttering like sparrows taking to the air, then caught between his deft fingers. 

‘I’ve played it a number of times,’ I replied. 

My father’s voice murmured through the back of my mind as the cards spread like a lady’s fan at the opera, then closed again. We must, as we battle for reform, not allow ourselves to be deformed . . . Gambling, cards, disorderly houses, the pool room, all these can divert us from holiness. 

‘The aim being to be the player who has collected cards closest to a total of thirty-one,’ he said as if he sensed my uncertainty. ‘A dollar note on the table, and each life you lose, you fold the corner. No more than a dollar lost in the whole game.’ He chuckled. ‘Ah sense you’re not a gambler, Mr Clellan. Ah know, of course, your aversion to such base pleasures. But if you’ll permit me a game, ah’ll tell you about my friend Murray Hall.’

The two candles of the bouillotte lamp bathed the mahogany surface in light, sharpening Joe’s features as he leaned inwards to offer the deck towards me. ‘Cut,’ he instructed, and I did as he said. 

‘The Widow,’ he repeated as his muscular, nimble hands dealt three cards to each of us, then slid a further three down onto the centre of the table. ‘Strange how many card games are named after the female cards, don’t you think, Mr Clellan?’ 

The man leaned back into his chair and inhaled deeply. He appeared to be studying me, just as he had those few years ago in Fatone’s. He hadn’t changed much, save the hint of grey in his moustache. I wondered for a brief moment if I had. He drew a box of cigars from his pocket and offered me one. I raised a hand and shook my head, then watched as, with a smirk, he lit his own. 

‘They say Murray Hall fooled many shrewd men. Well, you can count me as one,’ he said, taking a long draw. ‘Your start.’ 

I turned my cards towards me. On the table, flipped upwards, the flop contained a further three: a five of diamonds, a seven of clubs and six of spades. 

‘Murray loved this game,’ he went on. ‘First time ah ever saw him was in the back room of the saloon on the corner of fourteenth and sixth in the run-up to the 1883 senatorial election. Ah hadn’t gone in there looking for a poker game, just a drink and to eavesdrop on the gossip of the County Democracy crowd. Ah drifted into that room because the whisper in the bar was that they were back there, playing, and there was a big pot already building. This, ah figured, might be a game of some interest. Quite how much, I could not have imagined. Needless to say, ah played him at cards that night and lost. 

‘Always remember the first glimpse ah had of the little fellow with the hat, silhouetted at first by the lamp behind him. Watchin’ him play, ah soon realised that this was the fella people had been talking about. Murray Hall. Ah remember how he played, cigar between his teeth – though I don’t believe he lit it. At one point he held out a trey, a three, for a “kicker”, and, blame me, if he didn’t pull another three and a nine spot.’

‘I heard the woman was a remarkable shark – a killer instinct,’ I said, fighting to resist a smile as I stared at my cards. There, already, was an ace of spades and a Jack of spades, an early score of twenty-one. On the table, a further six. I waited for a moment, as if assessing my hand with uncertainty. If I could have knocked right then in the first round, I would have. 

‘That night he beat out three aces and swept up over a hundred dollars,’ said Joe, cigar smoke obscuring his face for a moment. ‘And this was a woman, a fella who stood two raises, on only two nines? Ah don’t believe it . . .’ 

I reached forward and pulled the six of spades towards me, replacing it with my nine of hearts. The man opposite smiled and plucked his hand off the table. He glanced at the cards for barely a second before he took my nine of hearts. 

‘It seems, over time, you got to know her better than most,’ I tried as I rearranged my hand. His manner was so casual that I wondered if he could possibly have forgotten our first meeting, if the incident was so frequent, or myself so unmemorable. 

‘Did ah know him well?’ he said, resisting the feminine pronoun. ‘You reporters and your questions! What does that mean? Ah knew his style as a poker player, what cigars he smoked, who he would lay a bet on in a fight, and what he was like to come up against in an election match, but if you’re asking me for details about where he came from and how he ended up in the city, you need to look elsewhere. Ah reckon most of us Tammany boys would say the same.’ 

I studied the face, the scar like a pencil line leading down to those jade-coloured eyes. Could he truly have forgotten me? No, I thought, it was more likely the man was playing me, waiting to see who would cave first. But I was far from caving. 

I knocked gently on the table. My heart pounded and I spread the three, the ace, the jack, the six. ‘Twenty-seven,’ I said, now allowing myself a flicker of a smile. 

‘Nice,’ he said, as he laid out his own spread of nine and ten of hearts. ‘A lucky first hand.’ Joe’s fingers reached forwards to pick up his dollar bill, flattening it on the table before turning one corner inwards. ‘One life gone,’ he said as he creased it with all the precision of Japanese folded paper. 

‘Ah’d say Murray was one who lost a few lives along the way. So be it. Lives are made to be lost.’ Those eyes held my gaze for a moment and he pushed the deck of cards towards me, his hands hovering a moment longer than I expected before he pulled away. ‘Your shuffle, sir,’ he said. The eye contact did not waver. 

 

Murray Hall by Milo Allan is published by Black and White, priced by £16.99.

Muckle Flugga is the debut novel by Edinburgh Makar, Michael Pedersen. We chatted to him about his writing life so far.

 

Muckle Flugga
By Michael Pedersen
Published by Faber

 

Hello Michael, it’s lovely to have you back here on BfS. So, you’ve given us poetry, you’ve tackled non-fiction, and now you’re releasing your first novel, Muckle Flugga; it’s all very exciting! When you started out writing, did you see yourself adventuring across genres?

Oh I’ve long worshipped at every literary altar I’ve come across. A cherisher of all genres, and a traitor to each. But, hey, I also love the stuff that dwells in-between these categories and realms – prose poetry melding into poetic prose; autofiction burling with biographical fiction; the literary misfits and pariahs that blur expected boundaries.

Poetry has been my staple, it oozes everywhere, all my prose is caked in the stuff.

In truth, I started writing non-fiction by accident because the words wouldn’t settle as poems. But suffice to say, the whole time, I’ve been building up to this first novel.

 

What can you tell our readers about Muckle Flugga?

Muckle Flugga is a book wrought with landscape and lore, bumps-in-the-night and celestial secrets; part friendship love story, part character drama, part starry-eyed waltz with the world.

It starts on a remote and rugged island, with a lighthouse standing sentry, its beam charged by starlight.

I knew it had to be a small cast: a lighthouse keeper and his dreamy son at the centre of it all – their world thrown off axis by a stranger’s arrival. It’s an old bonds up against new scenario with a deep historical resonance.

 

We love the thought here of literary Guardian Angels, so were tickled to read of Ouse’s friendship with Robert Louis Stevenson. We absolutely love his advice in the book! What does he mean to you as a writer?

 I adore RLS, he’s a dreamer, not a lighthouse engineer like the rest of family, but an imagineer that enlivens minds and doles out courage via his adventurous tales. My mum used to read me the poems from A Child’s Garden of Verses when I was a kid – she even put some to music for the bairns she taught at nursery (being a creatively driven nursery nurse in the Leith area of Edinburgh for most of her working life).

Also, I won the Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship a while back and got to travel to the verdant Grez-sur-Loing in France and stay at the infamous Hotel Chevillon (for a long November). So I stalked RLS to where he conjured a lot of literary lustre, and also met and fell for his wife-to-be Fanny Osborn. As I strutted around that village the air was lust-laden with inspiration and had me pondering with renewed purpose. If Muckle Flugga gets made into a blockbuster movie I’ll bring back that Fellowship – it changed me as both a writer and a person. I am indebted to RLS for its existence.

 

And did you have fun writing his character?

It was a total ball, but also terrifying. I’m a fervent RLS fan but by no means an academic source on his writing, my erudition is juvenile. And, well, there’s RLS aficionados the world overflowing with astounding knowledge on the great man.

I will say I got unique access to the RLS archive held by National Library of Scotland, via the curator Colin McIlroy, which bequeathed upon me some special insights. And also I drew a lot of sapience from a few key texts, namely: A Friendship in Letters: Robert Louis Stevenson & JM Barrie edited together by Dr Michael Shaw. That plus Bella Bathurst’s extraordinary book: The Lighthouse Stevensons. Oh, and the former President of the Robert Louis Stevenson Club, the good Dr Mitchell Manson, was kind enough to lend me a chunk of his collection, and helped unriddle a few riddles I was roosting on.

 

Have you ever been to Muckle Flugga? And the lighthouse? Or did you want to keep the place entirely imaginary in your head while you were writing?

I quested to the nearby island of Unst with Bill Drummond as part of a Neu! Reekie! adventure back in 2019 – together we gazed upon Muckle Flugga across the ocean. We also got invited into Muckle Flugga Shore Station (situated on north Unst) for Bill Drummond’s unofficial birthday party, which he ambushed upon an unsuspecting fan who’d invited us there for brunch post a couple of shandies at the previous night’s event.

I’ve a novel launch event with Shetland Arts at Mareel in July, me and Hollie McNish are going to try and journey there then. Hopefully with a bit of help from the fab Shetland poet Roseanne Watt, who’s also doing the show.

I will caveat the above by saying, my Muckle Flugga, though based on the real life Muckle Flugga we swooned over, has perhaps grown to ten times its size. And beyond that my island is known to shape shift, never fully settling. It carries something occult in its soil.

An absolutely fantabulous book map has been inked up by book map supremo Neil Gower to offer visual aid, should you need it. Book maps being very much in the RLS tradition.

 

Right away, we are drawn in to a world that is both recognisable yet dreamlike or reminiscent of fairytale. What are your thoughts on style and tone in writing?

Tones are less definable to me than notions of tenderness and tension and the rumination that orbits around them. That’s the type of mix I love, and that’s the ilk of storytelling that enthrals me.

I’ve been described as relentlessly optimistic, often flamboyant in my language, and I’m sensational in my soppiness, it’s all true / guilty as charged. But I love human complexities too, the grit and the struggle – we are all vulnerable beings wrangling with the massiveness of the mind and our place in this universe. I took all this to oath, and kept it close as I wrote and edited this book.

I also wanted to sculpt a character drama that felt it was deeply entrenched in the type of friendship love stories I lionise – the ones I seek out when lost and fragile and hungry for hope. Issues of class and identity had to rear their heads, alongside natural world wonderment, with modest flashes of magical realism.

In our wider quotes for the novel people reference JRR Tolkien, George Orwell, Margaret Atwood and Alan Garner, and naturally I was elated by all those literary tones, whilst paying tribute to the magnificence of each of their opuses. That’s to say, I wouldn’t be so brazen as to summon any of these giants in comparison, but I do adore all their multi-tonal writings and hopefully some of that seeps in – be it by tealight or tincture.

 

There is darkness behind the flights of fancy, on grief, loneliness, fear and regret, yet it’s done with depth and a lightness of touch or economy, that we’re wondering if you think your poetry background helped you with your novel writing?

 Poetry helps me investigate and understand the world; it helps me project my life into other people’s lives and invite them into mine. It’s never been about forensically pinning down the right answer for me, but learning to ask empowering questions that light the way forward. Even a glisk of light can be enough to rope the way home to a poor soul lost at sea.

That’s to say, yes ­– the poetic engine, the emotional compass within it, is revving in every sentence of this book, it helped steer me to shore.

 

As someone with a background in events organisation (long live Neu Reekie!) do you enjoy the promotional side of the writing life?

Unwaveringly, yes, I do. I love learning how to best represent the book in a live manifestation, injecting it with performative exuberance or unfurling from within it deep discussions. I love conjuring the launches and inviting kindred spirits to talk to me about the work and engage with the themes. I love talking to readers who the book has thrummed for, or who might have niggling questions, or impasses, they need answers to – quirks that exist in the novel’s hinterland, for better or worse.

On this gigantic novel launch tour, I’m in-conversation with / or performing alongside the likes of: Stephen Fry (Hay-on-Wye); Jackie Kay (Edinburgh); Val McDermid (Edinburgh); Denise Mina (Dollar); Fern Brady (London); Nicola Sturgeon (Glasgow); Hollie McNish (multiple locations); and more. What a carousel of joyous humans to be able to soar with – exquisite creatures each and all. My gratitude is gargantuan and growing, I’ll not mince my words here.

 

You were also named Edinburgh Makar last year. How have you found the role so far?

 Och, yes, I’ve love this role too. What an honour. To celebrate Edinburgh and poetry, preferably in unison, is how I go through life anyhoo, that revered banner naturally adds some additional bravura.

I look at the Makarship more as what I deliver than anything else. My first project was to launch the Edinburgh Makar’s Poetry Prize and get more young people writing poetry. Alongside the ace Janette Ayachi and Super Power Agency, we parachuted into three state schools to run workshops, give talks and launch a writing competition – aye, on the theme of friendship. And what a wealth of luminous entries we got. I’ll be growing that competition year on year.

There’s a couple of salient pieces I’ve conjured in the role. The first was being enlisted to write a poem to front a Samaritans campaign, helping launching their new SamariTartan range (yes, they had me at the name). The second was being tasked with sculpting a poem to celebrate Edinburgh turning 20 as the world’s first UNESCO City of Literature with nods to the city itself turning 900 years old ­– my ‘great Edinburgh poem’, so to speak. I tussled with this, the bifurcated soul of this city is rich with both marvels and mischief, but in the end it all came back to its people. I’m chuffed with how each project came to fruition.

There’s more interesting work to follow with the likes of Dynamic Earth and Edinburgh University Medical School (who’re turning 300 years old – imagine, aw them doctors and nurses and the lives they’ve saved), but I’ll keep schtum on that for noo.

My mettle is mottling as we speak.

 

Muckle Flugga by Michael Pedersen is published by Faber, priced £16.99.

Nina Allan has written a fantastic new novel, A Granite Silence, that explores a murder of a child in Aberdeen in 1934. It’s a hugely inventive novel that also explores how stories are made and how creativity happens. We spoke to Nina about her favourite books.

 

A Granite Silence
By Nina Allan
Published by riverrun

 

The book as . . . memory. What is your first memory of books and reading?  

I can barely remember a time when I wasn’t reading. Very early memories include the Ladybird Books version of The Little Red Hen, which I actually found quite frightening but could not keep away from. Another early favourite was John Burningham’s Borka: The Adventures of a Goose with No Feathers, which I still find absolutely magical. I soon moved on to the Enid Blyton ‘Adventure’ series, and from there to everywhere else. By the time I was seven, I could not imagine being on a long car journey or anywhere, really, without a book to keep me company.

 

The book as . . . your work. Tell us about your latest novel A Granite Silence. What did you want to explore in writing it? 

A Granite Silence tells the story of a real crime that took place in Aberdeen in 1934. The case attracted an enormous amount of press attention at the time, but has fallen out of the conversation since, at least partly because of the massive social and societal changes brought about by World War Two. The coverage of the trial in the newspapers brought to light some of the ways in which women were set at a disadvantage in the all-male world of the justice system, and I wanted to shed some light on that. The case was also one of the very first to have hinged on the scientific analysis of forensic evidence. Scotland was in the forefront of the development of forensic science, a fact I thought it was both interesting and important to draw attention to. More than anything though, I wanted to foreground the lives of ordinary working people in what could be a harsh urban environment. Families living in Aberdeen tenements were crammed close together with minimal facilities – tensions could run high, even between those who were normally on friendly terms. I would like to think that readers of A Granite Silence will come to know the people involved in this case as if they were their own neighbours.

 

The book as . . . inspiration. What is your favourite book that has informed how you see yourself?

Reading Sylvia Plath’s landmark poetry collection Ariel for the first time at the age of sixteen taught me everything I needed to know – both then and for the future – about the realisation of a personal vision through the medium of the written word. Plath’s immaculate synthesis of feeling, form and image can never be bettered in my eyes. My response to Plath’s work now remains as passionate as it was forty years ago, and reading her always leaves me both inspired and fortified. I would also add that anyone wanting to discover more about Plath’s life and work should seek out Heather Clark’s 2022 biography Red Comet. It is better than any of the others by some distance, centring Plath’s achievement as a poet and dialling down some of the rhetoric around her relationship with Ted Hughes.

 

The book as . . . an object. What is your favourite beautiful book?

This would have to be my Folio edition of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. As well as being one of the finest examples of true crime literature ever written, this particular edition contains some of the original photographic reportage of the crime at the centre of the story at the time it took place, images that formed part of Capote’s extensive files of research materials and that would have been there on his desk as he was writing. They are, still, immensely atmospheric. I like always to have this book in mind as an example of what can be accomplished in the field of the ‘factual novel’, as Capote himself referred to it, and this Folio edition is just such a joy to handle and read.

 

The book as . . . a relationship. What is your favourite book that bonded you to someone else?

My late husband and I talked about books non-stop, every day of our life together, but one particularly precious memory concerns the time soon after we met, when we were constantly comparing notes on the books that meant the most to us. I remember describing to him a novel I’d read when I was in my teens, a work of speculative fiction that imagined a world in which Queen Elizabeth 1 had been assassinated and Britain became a strictly Catholic country, with all development of the sciences firmly repressed. The book had made such a deep impression on me I could remember entire chapters virtually by heart – but I had no memory of the title or the name of the author. My husband was able to tell me even before I’d finished describing it that the novel in question was Pavane, by Keith Roberts, now seen as a classic of British speculative fiction. It turned out that he had read it on first publication in 1968 and it had always remained one of his favourite books!

 

The book as . . . rebellion. What is your favourite book that felt like it revealed a secret truth to you?

I first read Arthur Koestler’s 1940 novel Darkness at Noon in my late teens, and reread it several times over the following decade. The novel’s protagonist is Nikolai Rubashov, a committed communist in Stalin’s Russia who inevitably ends up falling foul of the secret police. The arguments rehearsed in the book – about art, about freedom, about whether the ends can ever justify the means – parallel Koestler’s own philosophical struggles and loss of faith in political ideology and had a profound and lasting effect on my own thinking.

 

The book as . . . a destination. What is your favourite book set in a place unknown to you?  

This might well be Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things, which takes place on another planet! The main character, Peter, is being sent as a Christian missionary to the planet of Oasis, while his wife Bea is left behind to cope with life on Earth amidst the accelerating problems of climate change and deepening social inequality. At the time Faber was writing this novel, his wife Eva, an artist and photographer, was dying of cancer, and Peter’s experience of estrangement and grief strongly reflects Faber’s own, albeit within an entirely different context. In Peter’s interactions with Oasis and its people, Faber has succeeded in creating a genuine sense of alien-ness as well as a strange kind of beauty. This is a novel that repays multiple readings and that has a truly timeless feel.

 

The book as . . . the future. What are you looking forward to reading next?  

I am about to start reading Daniel Kehlmann’s brand new novel The Director, which tells the story of Georg Wilhelm Pabst, the great Austrian film director who flourished under the Weimar Republic but who was later forced into a deeply uncomfortable relationship with the Nazi Minister for Propaganda, Josef Goebbels. Kehlmann has often based his novels around historical events involving real characters, but he always approaches his material from an unexpected angle and produces work that hovers mysteriously between the real and the imagined. I’ll read anything he writes!

 

A Granite Silence by Nina Allan is published by riverrun, priced £20.

Thirteen-year-old Samim is a loyal friend, a gifted chess player — and a refugee. After his family is killed in a bombing, Samim makes a long, dangerous journey from Afghanistan to the UK. But even then his safety isn’t guaranteed: Samim must tell his story to convince the authorities to let him stay for good. Here is an extract describing a moment in his escape.

 

My Name is Samim
By Fidan Meikle
Published by Floris Books

 

Istanbul, Turkey, spring 2021 

At Uncle Amir’s house, every morning at nine his sons brought tea and bread to our room. It was the routine everyone got used to, so we were all dressed and ready by then. 

But one morning, we awoke to a knock at around six, and everyone knew it was time. 

‘You have ten minutes to get ready,’ Uncle Amir said, peeking into our room. 

We gathered at the front door, and he handed us small food packets for the road. The handler with yellow teeth stood at the doorstep, leaning on the wall, smoking. He had a list in his hands. 

‘Samim, Zayn, Adel.’ He muttered the names with the cigarette between his teeth, clouds of smoke blowing out of his mouth. 

Uncle Amir motioned to us with his head to follow the handler. 

Darya, Zayn and I shared excited looks. We were so happy to leave together! 

We piled into the taxi, our chests throbbing with both joy and dread. 

‘Save your snacks,’ Darya warned us. 

Three hours later, we swapped the taxi for another car driven by an old handler who never spoke a word to us. The Turkish sky outside the windows was blue, the sun was warm, and as I sat next to my two best friends, flutters of hope warmed my chest. 

We talked, laughed, argued, interrupted each other and dreamt aloud. We wondered what our future homes would look like and what our friends would be called. We talked until we were breathless, and then we sat quietly for a while. In silence, drops of fear seeped into our chests, and we thought of our lost families. 

At midnight, we arrived at the seaport called Çanakkale. As soon as we got out, we felt the salty breeze on our tired faces and heard the wails of seagulls. We couldn’t see it in the dark, but we knew the sea was close. 

The driver led us to where a group of around thirty people stood in silence, surrounding a tall, bearded man who shone a torch on a piece of paper. The air smelled of fish and fear. 

The sea was calm, its waters motionless, like black glass. The pale moon hung over us, unfolding a thin golden path like a carpet towards the horizon. 

The moon is showing us the way, I thought. 

Our handler exchanged a few words with the man, among which we heard our names and the name of our smuggler, Mustafa. Then, the handler gave us a plastic bag with water and biscuits. 

‘Go with God,’ were his only words, but his gaze was full of pity. 

Zayn, Darya and I looked at each other as the trickles of fear in our chests turned into streams. 

The handler walked away, and the bearded man tossed us three red life jackets. We wrestled them on, then clambered, one by one, into a dinghy bobbing beside us. The bearded man was the last to board. He started the engine and passed the torch to the man sitting by the tiller, gesturing forward with his arm. The man at the tiller gave him a timid nod, and the bearded man leapt from the dinghy, untied the rope from the post and walked away without looking back. 

People shouted after him in panic. ‘What are you doing? Come back! Where are we meant to go?’ 

But the man dissolved into the night as we drifted further and further away from the shore. 

My chest tightened with panic. Why hadn’t he got in the boat? How were we meant to navigate it ourselves? 

The man with a torch wiped the sweat off his stubbly face, kissed the wedding ring on his finger and gripped the tiller tightly. He stared into the murky void ahead, his wild eyes flashing white in the dark. I don’t think he had ever steered a boat before. He had probably never seen the sea before. But people do whatever it takes to survive, and that night, the man who had never seen the sea became our captain. 

There were twenty-eight of us, packed in like dates in a crate, rubbing shoulders with one another, feeling each other’s breath on our necks. But although there were so many of us – men, women and children – no one spoke, which meant there was no distraction from the fear squeezing our chests. 

Drops of cold sweat covered my face as the town lights behind us grew smaller and paler. 

Soon, it was just us: a bunch of castaways jammed on a tiny dinghy, with blackness above, beneath, around and inside us. 

3.14159265358… 

‘We’re going home,’ Darya said, sitting between Zayn and me, her eyes smiling. 

‘We’re going home,’ I muttered under my breath. This must be the best sentence in the world. A spark of hope flared in my chest. 

But a few hours later, our engine started shaking with thunderous coughs. The dinghy slowed down and then stopped altogether. The sharp smell of gasoline filled the air. 

‘It’s leaking! The fuel tank is leaking! I think we’ve lost all our petrol!’ our captain hollered, his eyes wild. 

And with his voice, the black silence around us shattered like glass. People screamed and gasped, men tried to stand up to look at the engine, and the dinghy swayed from side to side. 

‘Stop! Stop moving so much, or we’ll all end up in the water!’ our captain yelled, and everyone went quiet. 

‘What do we do?’ a voice in the dark asked. 

But no one had an answer. 

Men tried to use their arms to row, sweat dribbling off their breathless faces, but hours later, we had hardly moved. 

The silver moon glowed as our sorry little dinghy bobbed on the never-ending inky waves. 

We spent the night praying. 

‘We’ll be alright, don’t worry,’ Darya said to two sobbing kids across from us. 

Their snotty faces were warped with fear as they clutched their mum, a thin woman with a gaunt face who swayed from side to side, eyes shut, lost in prayer. She was rubbing a silver locket on her neck, and I wondered what story it kept inside. 

‘Will we die?’ asked a little boy with blisters on his face, his voice croaky from crying. 

‘Don’t be silly!’ Darya waved her arm at him. She leaned towards him and whispered, ‘Do you want to know a secret?’ 

The boy nodded, blinking rapidly in excitement. 

Darya beamed. ‘My name is Darya. And Darya means “sea”. You see, I’m friends with sea gods, so I won’t let anything bad happen to you.’ 

A wide grin flashed on the boy’s thin face. 

I smiled, and noticed Zayn smile, too. He gaped at Darya tenderly, his eyes full of pride, warmth and wonder. I had never seen Zayn look at anyone that way before. 

We leaned on each other for warmth and comfort, and, eventually, the waves lulled us to sleep. 

The morning sun woke us, its warm fingers stroking our faces. And although we welcomed the warmth and the light, I wished I’d stayed asleep, dreaming of the rolling hills of Ghazni and my mother’s embrace.  

Around midday, a sudden scream woke me from my daydreams. 

‘Look! Over there! There are two boats there!’ the mother across from us yelled. ‘Two boats! And they can see us!’ 

 

My Name is Samim by Fidan Meikle is published by Floris Books, priced £7.99.

Esperance is a history-bending speculative fiction novel that’s pacy and thrilling, exploring impossible-seeming murders. We chatted to Adam about the book and about his thoughts on the craft of writing.

 

Esperance
By Adam Oyebanji
Published by Arcadia

 

Hello Adam, it’s great to have you back here on BooksfromScotland with your new novel, Esperance. Can you tell us a little bit about it?

Detective Ethan Krol is on the twentieth floor of a Chicago apartment building. A father and son have been found dead, their lungs full of sea water—hundreds of miles away from the ocean.

Abidemi Eniola has arrived in Bristol, England. She claims to be Nigerian, but her accent is wrong and she can do remarkable things with technology, things that her new friend, Hollie Rogers, has never seen before. Abi is in possession of a number of heirlooms that need to be returned to their rightful owners, and Hollie is more than happy to go along for the ride.

But neither Abidemi Eniola nor her heirlooms are quite what they seem. Abi is a target of Ethan Krol’s investigations, and Hollie’s life is about to become far stranger than she bargained for. In a clash of cultures, histories, and different ideas about justice, the consequences will be deadly.

This is a story about a cop who’s in way over his head, chasing a seemingly superpowered criminal dead-set on writing an old wrong, and a woman out of her own time and place prepared to do drastic things in expiation of sins that are not yet her own.

Also, I get to set some of the story in Edinburgh!

 

We know you better as a thriller writer with your Quiet Teacher series, but Sci-Fi is where you started out as a writer. How was it returning to the genre, and what was the genesis of Esperance?

I feel like less of an impostor when I write sci-fi, so returning to it is like coming home for me.  As for how Esperance came about, I’m a lawyer.  I went to law school at a time when law reports were read from books rather than computer screens.  As an inveterate browser, I would often end up reading unassigned texts—little slices of history— from hundreds of years ago.  On one particularly rainy day, I stumbled across a shipping case from the Eighteenth century that was such a stunning mix of incompetence and cruelty that it’s been at the back of my mind ever since.  Not so long ago, I was literally staring out into the street with a cup of tea in my hand when I had a thunderclap of inspiration (not how it usually works!), and Esperance was born.

 

There is a crime and mystery element to Esperance, though, and adding in the sci-fi elements should mean that you have fewer constraints on how your mystery can be solved. Or does having an ‘anything is possible’ approach to crime solving bring its own issues?

Okay, I want to make one thing very clear: anything is not possible when adding speculative elements to what is an otherwise ‘conventional’ crime thriller.  There have to be rules!  Rules which the reader must understand and the author must follow.  Otherwise the solution to the mystery will not flow from the story the reader read, and you will have abused the goodwill of someone who was kind enough to give up four hundred pages of their time to be with you.  I’m a big believer in fair play when it comes to crime writing, so pulling some anything-is-possible-type rabbit out of the hat at the last minute is a big no-no for me.

One second while I descend from my soap box . . .

To answer your question—and as you have probably deduced from the preceding rant—the challenge here is to craft speculative elements that makes sense to the reader, and you do that by making sure that your speculative world is rules-based and internally coherent.  Then—and this is where it gets really difficult—you have to explain those rules to the reader without giving them a lecture.  Otherwise it’s, well, a lecture, and no one wants that when they’re reading a novel.  In the end, the world your reader inhabits will have advantages and disadvantages, same as any other.

Think about mobile phones, a pain point for crime writers of a certain age who remember a world without them.  Have they changed how mysteries get solved?  Absolutely.  Have they abolished mysteries?  Absolutely not.  Certain things become possible in a world with mobile phones and other things become impossible.  However technologically advanced a world becomes there are always limits, and the writer who forgets that is in trouble.

 

It’s quite clear from when we first meet her that your character of Abi Eniola is not who she seems. Did you have fun inventing her? Is she a character you could return to in future books?

I had an absolute blast writing Abi.  An outsider with attitude, let’s say!  I would never turn down an opportunity to revisit a character like that, but it would have to be the right story.  I wouldn’t want to force it.

 

Your novels are always full of snappy dialogue. Is dialogue one of your favourite writing elements?

Thank you!  What a lovely thing to say!

I do enjoy writing dialog, probably because it’s the thing that feels most natural to me.  I was always the snarky kid who answered back in the playground, so that back and forth on the page is something I’ve been doing for a very long time.  On top of that, I spent many years of my life knocking around courtrooms.  In court, we tell stories by conversation.  I ask, you answer.  If I’ve done my job well, by the time the conversation is over, the story we’ve been trying to weave has settled deep in the mind of judge and jury.  My books have a lot of dialog, I suspect, because it’s become my default way of spinning a yarn.

 

The backdrop of your mystery is the Transatlantic Slave Trade. How did you tackle balancing covering such serious subject matter with the desire to write an entertaining, pacy novel?

By not overthinking it and concentrating on writing a crime thriller.  Thrillers, whether speculative or otherwise, are often fun, light and pacy.  It doesn’t mean that they avoid the hard, dark subjects. In fact, done properly, it’s those ‘unserious’ qualities that make thrillers the perfect vehicle for difficult issues.  Because thrillers can reach people who simply aren’t responsive to heavyweight tomes and who hate being lectured.

If you think about it, a thriller is almost always dark. People are murdered, planes crash, buildings explode, submarines get crushed like cans as they sink to the bottom of the sea.  None of this is actually fun.  But the intensity of the thriller, the pace of it, carries the reader along, breathlessly enthralled.  And thriller writers understand that, as in real life, dark and light often go hand in hand.  Some scenes in Esperance are out and out comedic, but they’re the spoonful of sugar that helps the rest of the book go down.  Just because a subject is serious doesn’t mean the writer has to be earnest and self-important about it.  In fact, earnestness and self-importance can get in the way of what you’re trying to do.

 

This is your 4^th novel this decade and we’re only halfway through! What are you working on now?

Right now, I’ve returned to the universe of Braking Day: a murder mystery (sort of) in space!  Apropos your earlier question about Abi, there is a supporting character in Braking Day that I really enjoyed writing.  This new novel is set twenty years earlier than Braking Day and is told from that character’s point of view.  After that, I’d quite like to write another Quiet Teacher novel, but one thing at a time!

 

Do you get time to read? You have a demanding day job too! If you do, what have been your reading highlights this year so far? Are there new books coming soon that you’re looking forward to?

I make time to read.  Reading keeps me sane!  I don’t read crime fiction when I’m writing crime but when I write sci-fi, I have to read it, too.  I have spent the last few months reliving my youth and re-reading my vast collection of C.J. Cherryh novels, mostly from her Alliance-Union universe, novels like Cyteen and Downbelow Station and Cuckoo’s Egg, which has the snappiest ending of any of her books.  As for books to look forward to, the paperback edition of Rachelle Attala’s The Salt Flats is about to come out.  After that, I’m hoping to have a crack at Dissolution by Nicholas Binge and A Line You Have Traced by Roisin Dunnett.

 

Esperance by Adam Oyebanji is published by Arcadia, priced £10.99.

 In Small Town Joy, trans writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall discovers the sometimes surprising ways LGBTQ+ artists changed Scotland’s soundtrack, meeting Scots artists, industry insiders and music fans to celebrate the music and musicians that filled floors, opened minds and changed lives. Here’s an extract that focuses on the brilliant Jimmy Sommerville and Disco.

 

Small Town Joy
By Carrie Marshall
Published by 404 Ink

 

‘Smalltown Boy’ may be one of the strangest singles ever to top the charts, peaking at number three in the UK and charting for twenty weeks in 1984. Where other artists took a kitchen-sink approach, throwing everything they could into their production, ‘Smalltown Boy’ is more minimal, centring those glacial synth notes and Jimmy Somerville’s beautiful, soaring countertenor, a voice that announces its presence with a note so high it could be a scream. ‘Smalltown Boy’ sounds like what it is: a song of sadness, of escape, of hoping for something better. Somerville’s backing vocals sound like ghosts.

Jimmy prefers not to do press interviews any more, but he’s talked about his love of music and of his songs many times. As he told The Quietus on the release of his disco album Homage in 2015, he spent his childhood in Glasgow’s Ruchill either watching Top of the Pops ‘religiously’ or being glued to the radio. Disco was huge at the time and he found himself drawn to it. ‘I think when I look back at all of those songs there would be a celebration and something positive in the sound,’ he says.

Although the teenage Somerville visited Glasgow’s gay clubs where disco was the soundtrack, he really made a profound connection with the music in his bedroom. Short, red-haired and looking ‘like a little girl’, as he described himself, Somerville was experiencing the ‘shame and guilt and real anxiety’ that so many LGBTQ+ people experience – but then ‘I would look in the mirror and pretend to sing like a Black man,’ he says. ‘It was my escape and my freedom.’

His primary gay club was Shuffles, in Glasgow city centre. ‘I first went on my own and I was completely shitting myself. I think I was so scared, I threw up on the bus on the way.’ But when he got to the club, Giorgio Moroder-flavoured magic was waiting. ‘The first thing I ever danced to in a grown-up club was fifteen minutes of Love Trilogy by Donna Summer,’ he says. ‘By the time it had finished I remember thinking: this is it. This is what it is all about and what I am all about.’

Like so many queer musicians, Somerville discovered a safe space in music – ‘I found a freedom on the dancefloor and also found a place to be on my own. I was in my own little world and I didn’t need to deal with anything else […] everything I have ever done has been to get to a club in order to dance.’

And he found something more. ‘Looking back at the history of the politics of disco, it was about gay men, Black men and also women having an uplifting celebration in the face of adversity and discrimination,’ he recalls. ‘While it’s easy to dismiss disco as a throwaway genre – stuff like The Bee Gees and Saturday Night Fever – it is actually about a whole movement of emancipated people seeking liberation.’

Disco happened a long time ago and it’s been endlessly parodied ever since, so what tends to stick in our mind is the worst of it from its final days, a time of novelty records, cynical cash-ins and even more cynical bandwagon jumping. Its modern-day incarnation as the sound of pink prosecco-fuelled hen nights and bad karaoke hasn’t helped either. But disco was much more than the two-dimensional caricature that persists in popular culture. Before it became commercialised and diluted, it was celebratory and defiant and dangerous – joy as an act of resistance.

It’s not a coincidence that disco started just after the bricks were thrown at Stonewall. That happened in the summer of 1969 after one heavy-handed police raid too many on the mafia-owned gay bar; one of the most influential disco clubs, The Loft, hosted its first party on Valentine’s Day 1970. The host was David Mancuso, whose house parties had already provided a safe space for his gay, Black and Latino friends to dance without fear of police harassment, and The Loft would continue that tradition. Regulars would soon be pivotal in creating hi-NRG and house music via their own nights, such as Larry Levan’s Paradise Garage and Frankie Knuckles’ warehouse parties in Chicago.

Denied safety and dignity by the outside world and by the US cops in particular, marginalised people found safe spaces to celebrate their lives, their love and their joy – and they did so at a time when the civil rights and gay rights movements in the US were moving away from a deferential, don’t-rock-the-boat kind of politics to something much more visible, vocal and vital. Disco was the soundtrack to a post-Stonewall world.

Inevitably, there was a backlash. Disco was too flamboyant, too decadent, too Black, too queer; Time magazine called it a ‘diabolical thump-and-shriek’. And perhaps the most visible example of the backlash was Disco Demolition, the ‘disco sucks’ event in the summer of 1979 that saw disco records smashed and scratched by a very white, very cis, very straight, and very male crowd in a Chicagoan baseball stadium. Instead of the expected crowd of 20,000, slightly more than the usual crowd for the White Sox, more than 50,000 people turned up and thousands more sneaked in after the gates had closed. The event ended in a white riot with an estimated five to seven thousand people invading the pitch, causing so much damage that the White Sox couldn’t play.

The parallels between the ‘disco sucks’ crowd and today’s self-proclaimed anti-‘woke’ warriors aren’t hard to draw, and while those involved in the event have long denied racism or homophobia, it’s hard to be charitable about a movement primarily made of straight, white young men who described disco as a ‘musical disease’ destroying art primarily made and enjoyed by Black and Latino people, gay people and by women. Attendees noted that the records some of those young men brought to smash weren’t even disco records, but albums in other genres by Black artists such as Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and Curtis Mayfield. As White Sox pitcher Rich Wortham put it, ‘This wouldn’t have happened if they had country and western night.’ At the end of 1979, Dave Marsh wrote in Rolling Stone, ‘White males, eighteen to thirty-four, are the most likely to see disco as the product of homosexuals, blacks and latins, and therefore they’re most likely to respond to appeals to wipe out such threats to their security. It goes almost without saying that such appeals are racist and sexist.’

Between ‘disco sucks’, novelty records such as Rick Dees’ quack-packed ‘Disco Duck’ – voted the worst song of the 1970s by Rolling Stone readers – and the inevitable commercialisation and dilution that ruins any successful musical movement, disco’s imperial phase was over. But while the reactionaries may have won the battle, they lost the war. Forced back underground, disco would be instrumental in the birth of house music, the New York clubs that would so inspire Madonna and a generation of pop idols, and the clubs in Europe that would create Eurodance. What had become tired and formulaic in the charts would return triumphant in a galaxy of new genres.

 

Small Town Joy by Carrie Marshall is published by 404 Ink, priced £11.99.

David Robinson finds a lot to love in reading Peter Marshall’s history of the Orkney islands.

 

Storm’s Edge: Life, Death and Magic in the Islands of Orkney
By Peter Marshall
Published by William Collins

 

If you want a crash course in how difficult it is to generalise about the past, try reading Storm’s Edge, Peter Marshall’s erudite yet accessible history of the Orkney Islands (‘If I read a better history book this year, I shall be lucky’ – Tom Holland)  which is just out in paperback.

Let’s say, for example, that you want to know when the islands changed ownership, religion, or language. Well, let’s forget the last one: no-one really knows when people stopped speaking Norn and started sounding Scottish because we didn’t have tape recorders back then.  But the other two, ownership and religion: well, there are treaties, parliamentary bills, wills, diaries, memoirs, all manner of appointments and titles. And we already know what was happening in Scotland, Britain and Europe, so surely we can fit Orkney’s story into the bigger picture quite easily?

Ooops. Big mistake. That’s not how Marshall writes history. All too often, he points out, Orkney’s history is told like that – as an afterthought, not important enough in its own right, only occasionally surfacing as a ‘case study’ in a bigger story such as the Reformation or the rise of the British Empire. Politely, carefully, unpolemically, he suggests a better way:  instead of looking at the history of the Orkney Islands through someone else’s prism, it should be valued for its own sake and, where possible, told from an Orcadian perspective.

When you do that, a number of things happen. We all (I presume) know about the impigneration of 1468 – you know, when ownership of the islands was handed by the king of Norway over as a sort of pawn ticket instead of a dowry for his daughter’s marriage to the king of Scotland. In hindsight it might look as though this is when Orkney becomes Scottish, but it’s not remotely as simple as that.

In 1468, for example, the bishopric of Orkney wasn’t answerable to anywhere in Scotland, as St Andrews only became an archbishopric four years later. Instead, the island’s clergy looked for religious supervision to Trondheim, which in medieval times had ten bishoprics under its wing:  four in Norway, and – moving westwards – Orkney, the Faroes, Sodor (Isle of Man and and the Hebrides), two bishoprics in in Iceland and a short-lived one in Greenland. As a corrective to an Edinburgh- or London-centric version of the islands’ past, that fact is hard to beat.

As Marshall points out, the islands were in geopolitical play for a long while after 1468. All it took was for one polity to have a serious reverse (the Scots offered the islands to the Norwegians after Flodden), be short of cash (the Danes made a 1542 offer to England’s Henry VIII), be fighting a civil war (Britain’s Charles I suggested deals to the Danes in 1640 and 1643 and his son Charles II offered one with the Dutch in 1653 ) and a Chagos-style islands-for-cash proposal would be made. Even if nothing came of any of these plans, the political ties that bound the archipelago to mainland Scotland or Britain don’t look particularly strong.

Ties with Bergen, however, were. The largest city in Scandinavia had all the wood the Orkney merchants could possibly want to build ships and houses back home in exchange for their bere (barley), malt and oatmeal, and as late as the middle of the 17th century 56 Orkney-born merchants were registered as burgesses in the city, compared with 69 from the whole of the rest of Scotland. And trade didn’t just mean trade. It could herald heresy too.  In those strange years when England was Protestant and Scotland Catholic, for example, those Orcadian merchants would visit many other countries where the Mass had already been abandoned, and purgatory abolished and statuary smashed. They were bound to bring some of those ideas back home.

And so they did, but again and to use the modern cliche, the Reformation in Orkney was a process, not an event. Unlike Professor Marshall, who has won the Wolfson history prize for his last book on the subject, I’ve always stayed well clear of Reformation history, so I’ll accept his assessment that in Scotland it began in 1559-60 but continued for years afterwards. The presbyterian variety took a long while to triumph in Orkney: so long that the islands had eight Protestant bishops before the abolition of the episcopacy in 1688.

Although religious change did come, it came with a peculiarly Orkney twist. If anything, that’s the point of Marshall’s history:  when you study history from the ground up at a local level, you realise how rarely events fit into any kind of generalisation. In 1561, for example, when their bishop (appointed by the pope two years earlier) tried to introduce the new form of worship at Kirkwall’s St Magnus Cathedral, a Catholic mob tried to stop him – almost the exact opposite of what was happening at the time in Perth, St Andrews and Dundee, where Protestants were ransacking churches and demanding the overthrow of the old order. And although Kirkwall’s cathedral was subsequently ‘purged’ of what Knox called ‘monuments of superstition and idolatry’, somehow three small statues managed to survive. It is, as Marshall points out, ‘unlikely to be a coincidence …. that they are stately images of the three Norse ruler-saints, Magnus, Olaf and Rognvald’.

Just pause for a moment to think about that, because it’s another paradigm about how the past sometimes lives on despite the present. When Kirkwall cathedral’s shrines were destroyed, the bones of the two Orkney saints – Rognvald and Magnus – were preserved, hidden away in nearby pillars and discovered, in one case, in the mid-18th century and in the other, in 1919. The skull believed to be that of St Magnus belonged to a man who was killed by a vertical blow, which matches much of the story of his martyrdom in 1117 as told in the Orkneyinga Saga, in which he implored his killer on the island of Egilsay to strike a blow to the front of his head rather than merely behead him like a common criminal.

The new religion meant an attempt to put an end to other beliefs too: saints’ days were scrapped, but pilgrimages persisted despite repeated censure from the pulpit. Throughout much of the period under Marshall’s magnifying glass – basically from 1540-1814 – ‘the old ways’ persisted in various forms, and Marshall breaks new ground in his comprehensive study of Orkney witchcraft.

Between 1594 and 1708, at a time when witchcraft was a capital crime, 97 people were accused of witchcraft on Orkney – proportionately twice as many as in Scotland overall. Most of them (81) were women, often itinerant ‘charmers’ practising magic from the pre-Christian Scandinavian past, begging for food, drink and money and making veiled threats if this was denied them. Very little seems to have had anything to do with the devil himself; it was more a case of placating the ‘fairy folk’ who were thought to be notoriously capricious in the spells they placed on crops, farm animals and people. Indeed, as Marshall points out in his book’s opening sentence, one of his own ancestors was killed by a curse from a witch (on Sanday in 1624) who was then burned at the stake just outside Kirkwall.

Since 2019, there’s been a small memorial on the spot where those accused of witchcraft met their horrible deaths. Carved on a blue-grey sandstone slab is a circular image of sundial (to show the healing passage of time) with the words ‘They were cheust folk’ surrounding it.

Indeed they were. Just folk. Folk who might have said an angry word when robbed of a handful of oatmeal (that’s why Anie Tailzeour, the woman who cursed Marion Paulson, Marshall’s ancestor, ended up at the stake). Folk caught up in feuds between rival landowners. Folk who were blamed for drownings at sea because they said the wrong thing at the wrong time.  Just folk. And the way Marshall writes history, putting the spotlight on Orkney and its people and showing how their history is anything but peripheral, finally does them justice.

 

Storm’s Edge: Life, Death and Magic in the Islands of Orkney by Peter Marshall is published by William Collins, priced £25.

Dark Crescent is a collection of seasonal tales inspired by Scottish folklore, landscapes, superstitions, and omens. We hope you enjoy this short story taken from the collection.

 

Dark Crescent
By Lyndsey Croal
Published by Luna Press

 

‘The Lighthouse Seer’

The boy arrived at Elenya’s lighthouse a day before her first Rites, sailing through the haar as if drifting over clouds. She watched his approach eagerly from the lantern room. It had been months since she’d seen another soul, except for the occasional seal or seabird seeking solace on her lighthouse cliff. 

When the boy was close, she descended the spiral staircase and walked barefoot onto her rocky island. The boat was moored at the small pier, bobbing on black waves. She took a deep breath and prepared herself. The air tasted of seaweed and salt, as it always did. Like home. She picked absently at the scales under her fingernails, from the fish she’d been preparing earlier. 

Her visitor eventually stepped onto land, carrying a wooden chest with a brass lock. He was dressed all in grey with hair the colour of night and eyes like silver. He couldn’t be much older than her, seventeen or eighteen. 

‘I brought an offering.’ His voice was hoarse suggesting a long voyage. 

‘You’re the Lighthouse Seer?’ 

Elenya nodded. ‘You’re a day early.’ 

His lips parted slightly, his breath escaping in a wisp-like mist. ‘Oh. Will you send me away?’ 

She frowned. Tomorrow, people would arrive from all over the archipelago to seek her Rites. Her job was to give them guidance for the months ahead, and they would bestow offerings in return—supplies or trinkets. She wanted to know what was in the boy’s chest. ‘I’ll be busy with preparations today,’ she said, then closed her eyes and inhaled slowly, feeling the change in the wind. Clear in her mind she saw it—a whirl of water, roaring of waves, thrashing of rain. ‘A storm will come tonight,’ she said half surprised at her words, the vision over. ‘You should stay here, there’s a spare room.’ 

The boy looked enthralled. Not many people got to witness a Seer’s sight. ‘I’d be grateful for your hospitality, Seer. I’m Shea.’ 

‘Elenya,’ she said before thinking, forgetting that she was supposed to have given up her name. She glanced around, expecting to see one of the Brethren appear and scold her for breaking the rules. 

‘I’m honoured,’ Shea said. ‘I’ll keep out of your way then.’ He made towards the cottage, but Elenya hesitated. It had been a long time since she’d been around anyone, never mind someone her age. 

‘Fish!’ she shouted. 

He turned. ‘Sorry?’ 

She scrambled for the words. ‘Do you like fish?’ 

He smiled. ‘I eat little else.’ 

‘Then join me for dinner later. I’d be glad of the company.’ 

‘And I yours.’ He disappeared into the cottage with a nod. 

Elenya headed to the lighthouse to continue her preparations. When the Brethren arrived tomorrow, they’d expect her to be ready. She lay the Seer’s map on the table in the circle room. It showed every island of the archipelago, half the land scribbled out as the sea had taken it. Where was Shea from? Or did he always live on his boat? She stared at the map for a long time, straightening the edges, running her fingers across the contours, trying to memorise every part. At its side, she placed a bottle of fish oil, seaweed paste, and a bowl of sea glass she’d collected over the months: oil to show fish stocks, seaweed to map safe sailing routes, and sea glass as a luck offering. 

Her preparations complete, she returned to the cottage and started a fire. As the sky darkened, the predicted storm began, with battering rain and whistling winds. Shea joined her, and she served salted fish and seaweed soup. As they ate, Shea told her of his journey—it had taken him six weeks to find her. He’d had to stop at various islands to ask for directions, though he said little about where he was from. She asked him what was in the chest, but he wouldn’t tell her yet. 

‘What’s it like when you use your powers?’ he asked after dinner. 

The storm was in full force now. Its rumble echoed through the walls making it feel like they were underwater. She shivered. ‘Like a memory, but more vivid.’ 

Shea held his hands in front of the fire. ‘What did you do before becoming a Seer?’ 

She looked at him, unsure what to say. ‘I lived on an island.’ 

He nodded slowly. ‘With your parents?’ 

‘Yes.’ 

‘Any other family?’ 

Elenya thought about it, but she couldn’t remember. Why couldn’t she remember? ‘I…I don’t know.’ 

‘And what did they look like, your parents?’ 

His eyes. They were so familiar. ‘I don’t know.’ 

Shea put a hand on her arm, and she jumped at his touch. ‘It’s okay,’ 

he said. ‘I’m here to help.’ Then, he pulled the chest over and unlocked it with a brass key. She shuffled back, suddenly worried what it might contain. But he only took out a sleek grey coat. 

‘Is that your offering?’ she asked. 

‘It’s more of a returning. Because it’s always been yours, Elenya.’ The way he said her voice sent shivers across her skin. ‘I’m glad you still remember your name. That’s a good sign.’ 

‘I don’t understand.’ 

‘When the Brethren stole you to take advantage of your gift, they made you forget,’ he said. ‘But they’re not your brethren. I am yours, though. Now that I know it’s really you, I’m here to free you.’ He held out the coat. 

Hand shaking, she reached out and touched it. A vision flooded into her head, like a tidal wave engulfing her senses. She was swimming, further and further, into the deep. And she felt at home there, in her sealskin, dancing beneath the waves, singing in her ancient tongue. She knew of the seasons and the way of the waves. It wasn’t the knowledge of the land-walkers. The ones that had ruined all that is sacred and beautiful. 

The fog was lifted. She looked up at Shea, her brother, her friend, her true brethren. ‘I remember.’ 

 

Dark Crescent by Lyndsey Croal is published by Luna Press, priced £13.99.

Tariq Ashkanani writes a dark tale on a serial killer in his latest novel, The Midnight King. We asked him to recommend other novels on serial killers that he considers vital reading.

 

The Midnight King
By Tariq Ashkanani
Published by Viper

 

Red Dragon

The biggie. Probably the book that had the biggest influence on me as a writer – it made me realise how dark and creepy stories could really be. At its heart it’s a pretty simple story of a detective hunting a killer, but the time spent fleshing out Frances Dolarhyde elevates his character wonderfully. Plus, Hannibal Lector!

American Psycho

Another excellent jaunt inside the mind of a deranged killer. In part a black comedy, a commentary on consumerism and filled with gruesome imagery, this isn’t your typical crime novel. The reader sees the world so completely through the unreliable eyes of Patrick Bateman that as the novel progresses, it becomes harder and harder to untangle what is fact and what is fiction.

 

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark

This account of the hunt for the Golden State Killer is an absolutely riveting read, and made even more so by the fact that it’s a true story. Michelle McNamara’s tireless investigation makes for fascinating reading – albeit a bittersweet one at times; McNamara sadly passed away before the book was released, and just shortly before the Golden State Killer was caught.

 

The Five

Another factual book, The Five explores the legacy of the infamous Jack the Ripper – but focuses exclusively on his victims rather than the killer himself. It makes for a refreshing take, and I certainly found that almost all of my preconceptions about the victims were wrong in one way or another. It also discusses society’s fascination with serial killers, and whether this is ultimately a good thing or not.

Sharp Objects

Whilst Gone Girl is the title that always comes up whenever people talk about Gillian Flynn, for me Sharp Objects is the better book. A journalist returns home to cover a series of murders and becomes embroiled with her family, the detective working the case and her own past. It’s an absolutely brilliant novel that keeps you guessing the whole way through.

 

Tell us about The Midnight King.

When it came to writing The Midnight King, I knew I wanted to write something dark and scary. What scares us changes as we grow older, however. I have two young children now, which I didn’t when I first started writing, and I realised that something happening to either of them was a new fear that I had unlocked. Exploring that felt like an obvious route to go down!

I also wanted to focus less on the traditional serial killer story and instead look at the legacy that a killer leaves behind. How it impacts on those around them – their family, their friends. What happens to those people once the killer is gone, and are their victims restricted only to the dead?

 

The Midnight King by Tariq Ashkanani is published by Viper, priced £16.99.

When whispers of abuse at Arrol’s department store reach Mabel, a determined policewoman, she knows she must act. Set against the backdrop of 1920s Glasgow, where women’s voices are often silenced, The Devil’s Draper weaves together crime, justice, and the fight for equality. We hope this extract whets the appetite to read on!

 

The Devil’s Draper
By Donna Moore
Published by Fly on the Wall Press

 

Johnnie wended her way through the well-dressed people chatting in small groups. She caught brief snatches of conversation as she passed: the happy couple were going to be honeymooning on the Riviera; the bride’s father had a fine stable of horses; had anyone else noticed the ghastly hat worn by Mrs Ellice… She took in the lie of the land, noting entrances and exits and places where staff were positioned, and then followed the steady stream of people entering the anteroom, where the wedding gifts were on display. 

The embarrassment of riches weighing down the tables and floor of the anteroom took her aback and she came to a sudden halt just inside the door. 

‘I say, m’dear, I’m terribly sorry.’ A red-faced gentleman had cannoned into her from behind. ‘You can’t just stop dead like that, ya know. I could have knocked you over and then where would we have been, hmm?’ 

‘I’m so sorry,’ Johnnie smiled at him and then turned her face quickly away, as if suddenly shy. She didn’t want him to recall her face later. 

Johnnie sauntered around the tables, affecting an interest in the cards attached to the gifts. And it was a fine array of wedding gifts: a tortoiseshell and silver dressing table set from Colonel and the Honourable Mrs Ferguson; two Rockingham china figurines from Mr and Mrs William Brody; a silver plated inkstand and silver stamp box from the Misses Balfour; a rather ugly set of china jam pots from Mrs Ellice – presumably the same Mrs Ellice of the ghastly hat. Somebody had thoughtfully grouped the gifts into their different types, making Johnnie’s job easier, and her eyes lingered only briefly on the furniture, the paintings, the linens, the kitchenware and the eight heavy volumes of The War, bound in red cloth. Really, what had the Major McPhee who had given those been thinking? What would a newly married couple want with books about a war they doubtless wouldn’t want to be even reminded of, let alone read about it in eight volumes? 

The books weren’t the only dud gift. Eglantine Cameron-Head – clearly a sworn enemy of the bride – had given the gift of an umbrella; the bridegroom was getting the reel for a trout rod from a Mr Brand; and a Mrs Denholm had for some reason thought that an old steel trivet was a welcome gift for the happy couple. 

One area of the table caught Johnnie’s attention in particular. 

Pretending to inspect a Liberty blotting pad and calendar, Johnnie glanced at the display of items to its right: a solid silver etui case, a diamond and sapphire pendant and earrings, a pair of matching gold watches, amethyst earrings, a set of gold and ruby shoe buckles, a rather fine-looking string of pearls and what looked like an antique diamond bracelet. Those and some other small pieces would do very nicely. 

She glanced around the room. As well as the door through which she and the other guests had come, was another, less obtrusive, door at the far end. Probably one for the staff. If she wasn’t mistaken, this one would lead to one of the side staircases. 

At that moment, a bell tinkled and the wedding breakfast was announced. Johnnie, along with the other guests in the anteroom, joined the rest of the party in the main room as they made their way to their seats. 

Johnnie fluttered around as if trying to find her place, managing instead to find her way back to the anteroom door. She glanced quickly around. The guests were greeting their seatmates and the staff were all busy. Johnnie slipped inside the now empty anteroom once again. Her dress had been especially fashioned with numerous, carefully sewn pockets everywhere. However, Johnnie had a better idea. She picked up Eglantine Cameron-Head’s very thoughtful umbrella gift, unfurled it, swept all the jewellery from that end of the table into the folds of the umbrella, plucked two small, silver photo frames and a silver sugar shaker from their places, tucked them into two secure pockets in her wide sleeves, and exited the room via the small door at the far end. 

She had been right. The corridor she was in led to a set of stairs and she tripped down them, smiling cheerfully at a young man on his way up, and left by the Woodside Crescent entrance. The weather had been overcast when she had entered the Grand Hotel and now it was raining. But the umbrella in Johnnie’s hand would need to stay furled. 

 

The Devil’s Draper by Donna Moore is published by Fly on the Wall Press, priced £11.99.

Walk Like a Girl is a true story about a one woman’s journey to find herself and her place in the world. She hikes through Georgia, Nepal and India while dealing with personal heartbreak. Here is an extract from her time in Georgia.

 

Walk Like a Girl
By Claudia Esnouf
Published by Sparsile Books

 

If we were going to hitchhike, we had to do it properly. We headed to the nearest petrol station with our backpacks to find scrap pieces of cardboard and felt-tip pens to write out our destination. As I set out to write MESTIA, Andy caught my wrist. 

‘Er, wait.’ He hesitated. ‘I think they write differently here.’ 

‘What do you mean? They’ll be able to read the same.’ 

‘No, I mean they have a different script. Squiggly letters.’ 

It took asking several different people before finding a man who could vaguely understand English. I watched as Andy tried to pry him for directions for Mestia. The man looked incredulously at us when he realised we were trying to hitchhike there. 

I imagined two foreigners in Edinburgh asking someone if they could hitchhike on Princes Street. They’d probably be escorted to a holding cell. 

Handily, he wrote out our destinations in Georgian on a piece of discarded cardboard. The Cyrillic script looked like a Comic Sans font from Microsoft Word. A few people lingered around the petrol station and watched us as we gathered our positions. 

‘Great, now we have an audience,’ muttered Andy. 

I clutched the piece of cardboard. We stood millimetres from the deafening highway; our bodies pressed against the dented road barriers that did little to protect us from the steep drop to the gorge below. Cars beeped, trucks blared their horns, people gestured out of their windows. 

‘What do we do now?’ I yelled at Andy. 

We could barely hear each other amidst the traffic racket. 

‘Stick your thumb out.’ 

‘I mean, that’s pretty dodgy. It’s quite forward and a bit embarrassing, really. I don’t know, maybe we should just pay for a bus. We don’t even really know where we’re going.’ 

‘Stick your thumb out!’ 

‘Why don’t you do it?’ 

‘You’re a girl; they’ll pick us up faster.’ 

‘You mean you want them to pick me up in the hopes they can have sex with me?’ 

‘Antonia, just stick your fucking thumb out!’ 

—– 

An hour later, we were standing in the same spot, puzzled at the lack of Georgian hospitality we’d read such great things about. 

Our small audience watched us lazily, amused. A man sitting in his car across the road was looking at us, shaking his head and fingers, and I shot him a defiant glare. He sighed and waved his hands and then parked his car on the side of the highway. He quickly ran across the two large lanes towards us. 

He was yelling at us in Georgian, and I backed into Andy, terrified we were somehow insulting him or his country. When he realised we spoke English, he exasperatedly tried to find the words. 

‘No…No Mestia. Impossible!’ he said. 

We argued, pointing at our maps and phones. It was possible, surely. 

He wouldn’t even look at our maps. Andy realised that arguing in English was getting him nowhere and began gesticulating, pointing fingers and using some invented sign language. 

Finally, the penny dropped. 

‘I think he’s telling us we’re hitchhiking the wrong way,’ I said. I pointed to my right. ‘Mestia that way. Yes?’ 

‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ He sounded delighted, patting us both on the back. 

Sheepishly, we grabbed our bags and crossed the road. 

I heard laughter and looked back, watching the audience at the gas station cheering. On the other side of the road, I stuck my thumb out again. In moments we were in a van, rattling away at the back. 

—–

The hitchhike experience took us through the hills for hours on end. We sat in the back of a van where the men in the front sat drinking beer, then were squished in the back of a car where about eight family members were already sitting like sardines. A baby sat on my lap while another child held my hand without a word. 

There was a father and son, where the son practised his English; and a lone lorry driver from Azerbaijan, who stopped at the side of the road and made us follow him up a hill so he could show us a holy cave. 

Our last ride to Mestia was a car that seemed to date back to the sixteenth century. It looked like a patchwork quilt, made up of different parts and seemingly held together by string. It rattled up the hill, creaking around every precarious corner, cliffs plunging down for several kilometres into dark crevasses. We were driving up the Caucasus Mountains. I shut my eyes, but that made me more carsick, so I tried to focus on the broken road in front. 

Andy wasn’t doing much better. The car was meant to fit five people at most, but we were nine, squished in and moving around every corner together. It felt like we were very slowly rumbling around Everest, past base camp and up to the peak. 

Suddenly there was a huge bang. The driver yelled. The car screeched to a stop. We all gasped, lurching into focus. Our driver climbed out and after much screaming, people climbing out on top of each other, we managed to slide out and saw a huge rock that had fallen from the mountain and dented the car roof. 

‘Lucky it wasn’t the windscreen,’ said Andy, who’d gone a further shade of white. 

I gulped. 

The driver, who seemed to have only just registered us all standing there, yelled at us to get back into the car, as he wiped his brow, issued a prayer and adjusted the wooden orthodox cross back onto the windscreen. Tension released and we heard nervous laughter. Some of the passengers clapped our backs, talking to us in fast, bubbly Georgian, and we nodded along in shock. 

 

Walk Like a Girl by Claudia Esnouf is published by Sparsile Books, priced £10.99.

Nate Yu’s Blast from the Past is a bighearted tale of family, forgotten stories and the search for belonging, from award-winning author Maisie Chan. BooksfromScotland caught up with Maisie to talk about the inspirations behind her book.

 

Nate Yu’s Blast from the Past
By Maisie Chan
Published by Piccadilly Press

 

Hello Maisie; it’s fantastic to see another book of yours out in the wild! What can you tell us about Nate Yu’s Blast from the Past?

Yes, I’d love to tell you all about my latest novel Nate Yu’s Blast from the Past! The book is about Nate who’s a myrmecologist which means he studies ants. His mums are kind, but Nate thinks they don’t understand him because they’re not Chinese. He makes a couple of new friends, and everything changes when he gets his hands on a shell casing from the First World War that is engraved with a Chinese dragon. He meets a ghost from the Chinese Labour Corp who doesn’t remember why he’s appeared. It’s a book about identity, untold histories and it has ant facts, karaoke and more surprises.

 

The book starts with Nate coming to terms with moving with his family from the country to the city of Liverpool, and to a new school. What did you want to explore with that ‘fish out of water’ dynamic

Many kids move schools, houses, or to different areas and I think often it’s underestimated how much that upheaval affects them. It’s a big thing but then throw in the mix the fact that someone has moved to a big city from a small village, and you have even more tension and things to get used to. I really like the ‘fish out of water’ dynamic and have used it a few times in my other novels. Nai Nai moved from China to Birmingham in Danny Chung Does Not Do Maths, Lizzie Chu from Keep Dancing, Lizzie Chu needs to take Wai Gong from Glasgow to Blackpool but she’s only twelve – it allows for different encounters with new and sometimes challenging things. I guess, you could say I am exploring resilience and what happens when the familiar becomes the not-so-familiar.

 

You work in such lovely details into your books (we’re big Beatles fans at BfS, so we appreciated the school’s House names); we loved too Nate’s passion for his ant farm. Where did you come up with that part of Nate’s character?

The ant fact part of the book was pure serendipity. I was walking my youngest child to school, and they told me an ant fact (very much out of the blue). It was – if you squash an ant, it releases pheromones so the other ants will come and find the dead body to take it away.  I knew there and then that I had to use it in my book, and I asked if it was okay. I like to give my main characters interests. It worked out perfectly because there was a link between ants and the men who worked in the Chinese Labour Corp. Each chapter of the book begins with an ant fact, and I tried to make each fact link to what was happening in that particular chapter. I like my readers to learn something new, which is an idea I got when reading Frank Cottrell Boyce’s books because I realised that I was learning a new fact about something in each of his novels.

 

You’ve introduced a supernatural element to Nate Yu’s Blast from the Past with the character of Jirou. Why did you want to move into this imaginative territory?

I always like to challenge myself. Writing contemporary books is within my comfort zone, so I wanted to see if I could write a contemporary book about history but also have a ghost in it. I need to keep the writing process interesting for myself and I wanted to have fun, plus young readers love ghosts in their stories. I found it hard to think about what the rules of the ghost appearing were because there are lots of different kinds of ghost stories – some are scary, some dark, some funny. I wanted my ghost to be in the funny camp – so it’s a bit like BBC’s Ghosts where only Nate can see him, and he’s got a mission. I want to continue to write for a long time if I can, so I am always looking for ways to write things that make it fun.

 

You’ve also shone a light on a moment in history that often doesn’t get talked about, the Chinese Labour Corp and their experiences in World War One. Can you tell us more about this? Do you remember when you first learned of them?

As far as I can tell there are very few books for children in the UK that mention any British Chinese history. I can’t actually think of one and I wonder if your readers can think of any. I remember studying history at school but finding it quite irrelevant for me. I think it’s that idea of not being seen as part of history and in Britain there is a constant feeling that we can’t forget the world wars we’ve been involved in. However, when I found out there were around 140,000 Chinese people in France who were helping with the war effort I wanted to tell others about it. I think I found out about the Chinese Labour Corp about ten years ago. I was surprised and had never heard about them as a child or even a young adult. I know in recent years there has been a play called Forgotten made about them and numerous documentaries. I read a few books about them by historians, and I read one book which was a fictionalised version which I found disturbing as it kept using a racial slur the whole way through. I felt that moving across the world also mirrored Nate’s move to a different place and I thought it would be brilliant for a Chinese ghost to help Nate with his issues about being Chinese.

 

Nate Yu and your previous books have often had your characters grapple with their heritage, and we loved how Nate and Missy responded to each other (even if their first encounter at the assembly gave us anxiety dream flashbacks!). How have readers responded to these explorations?

I do explore what it feels like to be an outsider or to not belong. It’s a common theme in my book and that’s because I am exploring my own feelings of not belonging. I am a transracial adoptee just like Nate and like Nate I didn’t feel Chinese enough and even pushed away ‘Chinese stuff’ as a child. This is why I feel it’s important for me to write about the themes that I do and to include things that are related to Chinese culture because it goes back to the idea of mirrors and windows. I am trying to write for multiple readers – ones who may have a connection to Chinese culture or who look Chinese but feel marginalised, and also those who know little about Chinese culture. I think readers have responded well, especially in Britain as my writing is very British and there is a lot of empathy in my books. I’ve had lots of lovely reviews from fellow authors and a few of them said how relatable it is for diasporic kids who might have heritage from different countries but who are also British.

 

Although you’ve probably spent the last few months focussing on your writing, what are your favourite books you’ve read this year so far?

I enjoyed The Shrapnel Boys by Jenny Pearson which is a Second World War book about boys in London who have to endure time in bomb shelters, but it also explores big subjects like fascism and male role models. I thought it was very clever. I also admire how Jenny has gone from writing very funny books to this fairly serious historical novel, although it also has lots of moments of humour. I’m reading The Doughnut Club right now by Kristina Rahmin and it’s about a girl who finds out she has sixteen donor siblings, and she wonders if any of them are like her.

 

Nate Yu’s Blast from the Past by Maisie Chan is published by Piccadilly Press, priced £7.99.

Ideal for readers of The Last Witch in Scotland, The Witches of Vardo, Bram Stoker or for those with an interest in witchcraft lore, Scott O’ Neill’s novel tells the tale of a curse in 19th century Edinburgh. In this extract, we find out the origins of the curse.

 

The Witch, the Seed and the Scalpel
By Scott O’ Neill
Published by McNidder and Grace

 

‘What did she do?’ The question issued from the back of my throat in a dry, nervous rasp. 

‘She did what all witches do when their monstrous intentions are thwarted. She prayed. But she prayed not to our one true Lord God in Heaven, for her heart did not flow with the love and truth of Christian blood. No, her heart was a coal-black stone of hate and spite. So at midnight on All Hallows’ Eve she climbed to the top of Calton Hill, sat herself upon the grass and lit a small fire made from the bones of her most recent victim. With eyes closed and the flames warming her cruel, hideous face, she pushed her hands into the dirt and prayed for her master to appear before her. When at last she stopped her incantations, she opened her eyes and with immense joy she saw the Devil himself standing before her. He smiled, ran a hand through the hair of his adoring disciple and asked why he had been summoned. The Witch McKay begged him to grant her the power to enter the dreams of all Edinburgh’s children so that she might fill their sleep with nightmares of such terror and horror that they would die in their beds of fright.’ 

As Father said this, a little pile of rust-coloured leaves became entangled in a spiralling breeze and were scattered across the hollow. 

‘And did he?’ I swallowed, anxiously. ‘Did the Devil grant her the power?’ 

‘Satan said not a word. He simply kissed the witch on the cheek and was gone. The very next night, from the Castle to the Tolbooth and all the way to the Palace of Holyrood, the air was filled with a terrible noise. A noise so awful it chilled every last soul in the city to their very core. Can you imagine it? The screams of all those infants echoing through the alleys and streets. Can you imagine the sheer terror of all those sleeping children? Their nightmares filled with visions of the Witch McKay, her eyes as red as fire, her teeth sharper than broken glass? Can you imagine them in their beds so terrified that their poor hearts simply burst with fear? That is no way for any Christian child to die. But die they did. In their scores. Eventually the screams faded and were replaced by the sobs of countless mothers and fathers mourning their dear departed children. It was undoubtedly, the bleakest night in all of Edinburgh’s long and cruel history.’ 

My gullible young mind had no difficulty at all imagining in stark, unhurried detail all the macabre horrors Father described. I retreated from the twisted, malformed tree with a shiver. 

‘But the witch was caught, wasn’t she? You said she was executed. That means she was caught, yes?’ 

‘She was discovered hiding in a cave near the summit of Arthur’s Seat by a group of boys not much older than you are now. Margaret McKay tried to scare the boys away, but they were a cocksure and insolent bunch and not easily frightened. 

They had no inkling as to who this strange hermit woman was, living in a grubby hole full of animal bones and foul-smelling potions. It was not until they came upon a horde of strange little boxes piled one atop the other at the back of the cave that they began to understand her true nature. The oldest boy opened one of the boxes and found inside a tiny doll, its eyes closed and little arms folded across its chest, looking for all the world like a tiny body at rest inside a coffin. It was then they realised they were in the presence of a witch and the miniature coffins were in fact the tools of her devilish trade; the very tools used to cast spells on those innocent children who went to bed with their heads full of pleasant dreams until the witch’s curse turned them into the terrible nightmares from which they would never awake. But thanks to those foolhardy lads, Margaret McKay was apprehended before she was able to lay waste to another soul.’ 

Father reached down to gather a handful of the rich, mouldering earth. He brought the little heap close to his keen eyes, studying it minutely. 

‘It was here that the witch was hanged, her body burned to ash and the ashes buried where no one should ever find them.’ 

‘Good. I’m glad. It was no more than she deserved,’ I said, heartily relieved to hear the story had a happy ending. 

‘And yet, the old legend persists…’ he mused in a worrying undertone as he allowed the soil to crumble through his fingers. 

‘Legend? What legend?’ Father brushed the last granules of dirt from his hands. 

‘Perhaps I have said too much already. Your mother will have my hide if she learns I’ve been scaring you with these things.’ 

I tugged insistently at my father’s cuff as he turned to stride for home. ‘I’m not scared. And I promise I won’t tell mother.’ 

‘Very well,’ he sighed, then patting a slab of bulging root, he encouraged me to sit with him beneath the Witch Tree. 

‘Have you ever heard the legend concerning the last chestnut.’ 

‘No. Never. Tell me.’ 

‘Up there. Do you see it?’ said Father, pointing to the top of the Witch Tree. 

Try as I might, I could see nothing out of the ordinary amongst the curling brown fronds and the healthy crop of chestnuts hanging from its branches. I shrugged in defeat. 

‘There, just beneath that jay. See it? The big one?’ 

And there it was. The highest in the tree. A monster of a chestnut. As large as the bird perched immediately above. 

‘I see it!’ 

‘You’ll find it growing there every year without fail on that very same branch. Despite being substantially larger than all the others, it is always the last to fall. There is a legend that says this strange chestnut is imbued with a dark magic.’ 

‘What kind of dark magic?’   

‘Witchcraft,’ said Father. ‘It is said that should any person catch the falling chestnut before it touches the ground, the ghost of Margaret McKay will appear and bestow the catcher with abnormal strength and longevity and grant their every wish and desire.’ 

‘Like money and gold. Or endless cake?’ I said, excitedly. 

‘All the cake you could ever eat!’ he laughed. I stared unblinkingly at the tempting bauble, willing it to fall. 

‘Have you ever tried to catch it?’ 

Father lowered his rueful gaze and idly swept a boot back and forth, brushing aside the carpet of leaves and twigs. 

‘Oh, I have spent many a day sitting under this tree waiting for it to drop,’ he said. ‘As have many others over the centuries. Alas, no one has ever managed to catch it.’ 

‘Why don’t we climb up and pick it from the branch?’ 

My suggestion, which I thought a perfectly reasonable one, was received with a sour twist of Father’s lips. 

‘Ah! Firstly, the legend insists the chestnut must fall of its own accord and not be plucked by an unworthy hand. Secondly, it is far too dangerous. To fall from that height is to fall to your death. I fancy the chestnut is like Excalibur waiting to deliver itself into the hands of one possessed of true virtue. And as your mother will readily attest, I am no King Arthur,’ he smiled. ‘Speaking of your mother, it is time we returned home before we risk a fate far graver than any witch’s curse.’ 

 

The Witch, the Seed and the Scalpel by Scott O’ Neill is published by McNidder and Grace, priced £9.99.

When a dilapidated distillery comes up for sale in rural Kintyre, Eilidh and her wife Morag jump at the chance. But their ambition to run the first women-owned whisky distillery in Scotland seems to be scuppered when a grisly, decades-old secret is revealed: two dead bodies have been stuffed into barrels, perfectly preserved in single malt. Enjoy this extract from The Malt Whisky Murders.

 

The Malt Whisky Murders
By Natalie Jayne Clark
Published by Polygon

 

Now, here I was, dressed in a beige sweater that wasn’t mine, in Campbeltown, nearly two decades later, with a beautiful wife, proudly bisexual, my very own whisky distillery, replete with a pair of decades-old corpses, with someone asking me questions on camera for the BBC. 

‘You’re well known in Scottish whisky circles for your long-running, successful blog “Wisdom in Whisky” and the subsequent prize-nominated book of the same name. Can you tell us more about how that began? Please remember to mention the question in your answer this time.’ 

‘Yes. Well–’ 

‘And to look into the camera.’ 

‘Haha, this is why I have a blog, not a vlog.’ Heather didn’t laugh. I pulled the sleeves of the jumper over my hands and stretched my arms outwards, looking over to the purply water’s edge, as if taking it all in before I tried again. 

‘I began my blog “Wisdom in Whisky” while I was still at uni, in Stirling, because it was my obsession at the time. I’d had a few before – just ask my old flatmates about my torrents of tangles of threads during my cross-stitching phase or the period where I didn’t leave my room because I was watching every single Jonestown documentary.’ 

Heather looked blank. Maybe she didn’t want to hear about that. I hate people who don’t show their thoughts on their faces. I can’t help but do it myself, so it doesn’t seem fair. 

‘I tried my first whisky in a new pub that opened up in 2005, in Stirling. I was led through a tasting – a private tasting, essentially – and then I saw it in a whole new light. It was like magic, how something that before simply seemed to all be the same brown liquid now came to me as layers and layers of sensory experience and care. I think it was when I first learned about maturation that I was hooked. ‘The casks, the barrels, add so much depth to the liquid. I love that whatever they held before – sherry, bourbon, port, even whisky – influences the new-make whisky we put inside to mature. Not only that, the casks are toasted to break down the structure of the oak and sugars, and how lightly or heavily you toast the wood creates different flavours again. Some even say the type of soil in which the trees are grown affects the flavours. Distillers might take into account the rainfall of the area of provenance and how the wood was originally dried. That’s all without taking into consideration the size of cask you use, how many times it’s been used before, how long you leave your whisky in there, how many casks you move the whisky between, the weather as it matures and the geography of the area where it lies – even the way the logs were originally cut can affect the final product because of how the wood grain contacts the alcohol. And that’s just one element of the process of whisky creation.’ 

I was still getting zilch from Heather. 

‘My blog though . . . you asked me about that. Essentially, I wasn’t going to my lectures, for a variety of reasons, and I started writing the posts for fun, instead of doing my essays. I was meant to be studying English, because that’s all I was really good at, except after one of the first seminars, your classic “death of the author” one, I became more interested in philosophy. If I’d been more proactive, maybe I might have changed subject and actually finished with a decent grade, but . . .’ 

I’d forgotten the question. Heather prompted me: ‘Yes, and tell us about the book and blog, please. How did that happen? How did you get noticed?’ 

‘I had thought it was funny to compare a whisky to a certain philosopher or their, like, policies? No – schools of thought. So, like, an Auchentoshan to Noam Chomsky, or a Glen Livet to Hannah Arendt. It sort of caught on – it was a different way of viewing both the whisky and the philosopher, I think. It grew from there, but the real growth was when I branched out from philosophers to writers and thinkers of any kind and when the comments sections in themselves began containing essays. That was a bit of a wild ride – I started getting invited to things. I got an offer from a publisher too. I had a year to write the book, but really most of it was written in the last month. Anyway, it was, I suppose, semi-successful, as successful as a book can be these days without being Richard Osman or whoever. I moved beyond the pub in Stirling and went to tastings and festivals elsewhere. Most of my student grant went on that, actually. That’s how I met Morag too.’ I looked about for Morag, for some assistance, a nod that confirmed I wasn’t wittering and I was making sense. But she was still dealing with the roofers, who had decided to start charging god knows how much just to survey the buildings before they even began work. I paused and glanced at my interviewer. 

Heather was a few years younger than us, someone who seemed to have skipped the awkward, unsure years of her youth and zipped straight to the self-assured I-don’tsmile- for-anyone phase. Morag knew her quite well from her reporting days and told me multiple times how lovely she was and not to read anything into her dour facial expressions. 

‘Thanks for that, Eilidh. I think we’ve got all we can outside for today. It’s bloody miserable.’ 

Like she could talk. 

‘So how about we do some inside shots? All those barrels in the warehouse? You’ve not got much else to show for the cameras yet. Maybe find one with a historically significant year on it? How does that sound?’ 

Yesterday morning, when the roofer arrived early, very conscientious and aware of the awful windy and winding road down from Tarbet, we hadn’t yet put the bodies away. It was Bruno that saved us. Big dopey lovely Bruno. He basically took a running jump onto the man and crashed into him with such force he ended up on his back. Our dog is mostly well-trained, but sometimes he gets excited, and he hadn’t slept much. Neither had we. Morag had taken the roofer, Rodney, to recover with a cup of tea, far away from the warehouse. It had been up to me, alone, to cram these bodies back into their cask coffins, replace the fetid liquid and roll the barrels away. 

 

The Malt Whisky Murders by Natalie Jayne Clark is published by Polygon, priced £9.99.

Water has always been a constant theme in Gordon Meade’s poetry, from his earliest memories of the West Sands at St Andrews, through the Northumberland coastline, via County Cork and the canals of Venice, to the beaches and harbours of the East Neuk of Fife. Here is a sample of poems from this beautiful collection.

 

Beyond the Ninth Wave
By Gordon Meade
Published by Into Books

 

Beyond the Ninth Wave

What are you given
to start with? A boat –

no oars, no sails, no rudder,
a knife, a flask of water.

Beyond the ninth wave
this is all you need.

Oars are useless;
your strength soon wanes.

Sails are useless;
there is no wind.

And a rudder is useless;
the horizon shows no land.

The water is useful;
all around you is salt.

And the knife is useful
to cut out useless thought.

 

Hooked

On fishing trips with my father,
I would stand behind him as he cast,
imagining the hook, on the back swing,
embed itself in my cheek and, with a flick
of my father’s wrist, burrow itself
even deeper in through folds of skin

into a bloodied mouth. I would
imagine the pain and the panic that
ensued, both of us fighting to get
the barb free, out through my flesh
and into the fresh river air. Of course,
none of this ever happened. I stood

well back, outside my father’s
reach, underneath a canopy of trees.
Like them, I stood there motionless,
never saying a word, the angler’s perfect
companion. And if I ever developed
into a serious thinker, which I doubt,

that is where it all began,
watching my father fishing in
the River Earn. Him, catching what
he had come for, salmon and trout,
and me, imagining the pain of being
caught, already hooked on thought.

 

A Sort of Homecoming

The sea is in
one of its strange moods,
forever threatening
to turn brown.

I would like to say
it is gun-metal grey but
it is more the colour
of a faded saddle-bag

like the ones I used
to see in Westerns. The tops
of the waves still manage
to keep their heads

above the water
from which they are
made. Pure white, the only
way they can escape

the general drabness
is by dashing themselves
against the rocks. Further out
there is no such luck.

They have to wait
until they have been
carried to the shore. Like so
many ships before

them, they will come
to realise that the biggest
danger lies when you are
closest to home.

 

Earthworms
for Geoff Wood

Earthworms, it seems, are made of tongues,
and are able to taste with every inch of their writhing
bodies. What a life of joy they must have,

and a life of horror, to not be able to turn off
life’s every passing flavour. I remember the ones
my father and I used to dig up in the back

garden as bait for our fishing trips. Could they,
I wonder, taste the cold steel of the spade, the shock
of the autumnal air, the heat of our fingers

as we lifted them from the earth, the plastic
of the bag in which we carried them to the river’s edge,
and then, their own blood as we impaled them

on the hooks, the chill of the fresh water, the mouth
of the fish as they were swallowed? What a life, and what
a death – all taste and savour – until the end.

 

Beyond the Ninth Wave by Gordon Meade is published by Into Books, priced £9.99.

 

Step back to the summer of 1978, where young Colin Quinn finds himself on South Uist with his charismatic uncle, Ruairidh Gillies in A Summer Like No Other by Martin MacIntyre, the English translation of his acclaimed Gaelic novel Samhradh ’78. Enjoy this extract with lovely nostalgic detail!

 

A Summer Like No Other
By Martin MacIntyre
Published by Luath Press

 

The moon suddenly broke through the murky sky and spilled through my back window. I had a look out, wondering too whether to have a last cup of tea and slice of toast – both from newish appliances – but the illumined fields held my attention. Their sepia wash conjured daytime vigour gone-by rather than today’s empty waiting evening. 

Then a thud against the loose wooden frame threw me back a few feet. ‘What the…?’ My first thought was of a dead body unloaded and allowed to fall under my very nose, but the preceding silence pointed against this. A gormless, toothless, goat-grin pushed my humour more than it should have. 

‘Thalla!’1 I screeched, lifting the windowpane. The billy darted backwards then forwards again, as if mimicking a dog. It wanted me to play – perhaps throw a ball like that poor woman’s collies. Unusual for Ruairidh to leave the gate open. My cool enquiries outside confirmed he hadn’t. The wily beast had slipped through a barbed gap in the fence. It did though exit through the gate. I made sure of that. But who kept goats in Eòrasdail? 

While 1971, the year of my thirteenth birthday, will forever be linked to Creamola Foam – mostly orange – 1978 was the summer of lemon curd. I had tasted the stuff before, but it wasn’t something my mother ever purchased. Ruairidh had got it in for me on Ealasaid’s recommendation. This surprised me a little, as the homemade jams at Duns had been so varied and plentiful; but, of course, while much lauded by Ruairidh, these really had been the ‘preserve’ of Aunt Emily. 

I remember laughing at this unexpected, unintentional, pun and wondered if I might slip it casually into conversation with my uncle. Given our earlier encounter with Jane MacDonald, perhaps it was better I didn’t prod memories of his late wife’s prowess, or risk offending him, when I was greatly enjoying lathering my toast with Co-op bought goo. 

A bit strange, I thought back in the sitting room, that someone as able as Emily never returned to work after she’d had Iona, the elder of my cousins. Had running everything connected to hearth and home provided as much satisfaction as a busy hospital job? Neither daughter had chosen medicine. I wondered whether this was a consequence of their mother’s decision or more from having lived with Ruairidh.  

In the living room, I’d stretched up to turn on the radio for the headlines when the front porch door opened. While swivelling the aerial, I learnt that a previous despot’s life had just been ‘ended’ in Comoros. Where exactly was this troubled country, I wondered, as muffled sounds slunk through Taigh Eòrasdail’s passageway? 

And what might be the impact of the other news: that Labour, and not the SNP, would now represent Hamilton in Parliament – even though the bi-election was brought forward to accommodate the World Cup? No, none of my uncle’s usual brisk movements or a hummed or whistled tune were in evidence. 

The programme finished, the pips played out in full signalling 11.00pm, and we were well beyond Rockall in the Shipping Forecast, before I heard a hand on the opposite side of the door. At first it failed to open – that worn brass handle could slide a little, even without the help of errant butter or lemon curd. 

‘Ruairidh?’ I shouted, leaping to release the latch from my side. My uncle half-stumbled, half-fell, through, still in his coat and hat. Tears filled his normally lively, now-dulled, eyes. 

‘He was almost gone, Colin.’ 

‘Alasdair mac Sheumais Bhig? O dear…’ 

‘No! Stuff him and his poisoned-dwarf minder. The wee fellow. Anna Morrison’s new baby.’ 

Ruairidh suspected a near cot death, the child being blue when his frantic father ran into Daliburgh Hospital at 9.00pm. He had fed well, exclusively on the breast – despite the pressures – and had shown no change in character all that day. Plenty wet nappies. No unusual or prolonged crying. No signs of a cold or fever. Nothing. Anna had placed him on his tummy like all his brothers and he’d slept contentedly without a fight. 

‘They’ll have to do further tests in Glasgow’s Yorkhill, look for some sort of underlying condition. Having a child die on you is horrible, a Chailein!’ My uncle’s last sentence in Gaelic: mìchiatach, the descriptor. ‘By the grace of God, or some sixth sense, I popped in on my way home from an old dear in Kenneth Drive. Of course, Eric Adams rushed down and stayed. His wife arrived later with soup and a new shawl, a lovely gesture. The family were in total shock. You still on the lemon curd? Well done, a laochain.’2 

How might it have been for Uncle Ruairidh, I considered, while tossing and turning on the pillow, to have come back to an empty house after such an incident, especially if the baby had died? To sit there where I had been sitting – a widower alone with his mortality and the bleak unyielding rhythm of the Shipping Forecast? Ruairidh needed me now, no matter what happened with the bold Jane. He might though ban me from trying. 

My late dream that night contained the image of a young footballer in a blue top, ceaselessly scoring the same goal, but on turning to receive adulation from his fellow players is reminded that he is dead. ‘Tha sibh michiatach!’3 he screams and tries again. 

 

1. Scram!
2. lad
3. 3. You’re all horrible!

 

A Summer Like No Other by Martin MacIntyre is published by Luath Press, priced £10.99.

Scotland is known for its three languages, and though most of our books are published in Standard English, we have a rich list of books written in Scots and in Gaelic. As we like to highlight the best in new releases, here are some Scots and Gaelic books published in the first half of this year.

 

 

The Moggie Thit Meowed Too Much
by Emma Grae

The Moggie Thit Meowed Too Much by Emma Grae, illustrated by Bob Dewar, is a beautifully written Scottish children’s book that sensitively tackles the theme of loss. Set in the vibrant world of the Scots language, this story follows young Skye as she cares for her granny’s beloved cat, Puffin, after her granny passes away.

This book is perfect for children aged 4-8 who are coping with loss, as well as for families wanting to introduce Scots language in an accessible, heartfelt way.

 

 

 

 

 

The Lass & The Quine
By Ashley Douglas

The Lass & The Quine is the first original LGBT+ inclusive children’s book published in the Scots language. An illustrated storybook for children of primary school age based on the poem ‘The Lass and The Quine’ by Ashley Douglas. It is a new Scots fairy tale that challenges those you know in a clever and enjoyable way. The story concerns ‘a lass and a quine whae are awfie different in ivery wey, but whae faw heid ower heels in luve – meetin a wheen animals o the forest alang the wey!’ It has a timeless feel, but what makes it so special is that the love story is one between a girl and a princess, not a girl and a prince.

‘An absolutely smashin story frae an absolutely stoatin scriever’ – Thomas Clark award-winning children’s author, Peppa’s Bonnie Unicorn and Diary o a Wimpy Wean

 

 

 

Tongue Stramash: Poems in Scots
By David Bleiman

David Bleiman, a regular of the Edinburgh Stanza Group, is bringing out his first collection, Tongue Stramash, a book of poems in Scots.  He lives in Edinburgh, writing poetry in English, Scots and a little Spanish and Yiddish. He particularly enjoys writing multilingual poetry, including a part-excavated, largely reimagined dialect of Scots-Yiddish.

‘Sich a braw wheen o poyums, David Bleiman’s Tongue Stramash left me a little bit breathless and giddy, heart-wrung and laughing out loud. His sheer delight in the Scots language is evident in every brilliant verse. He explores loss, language, history, place and is not afraid to take on the greats such as Burns and Fergusson. The mixter maxter of Scots and Yiddish in some of his poems further adds to the richness of the collection. This is a book to be relished  – a welcome addition to contemporary Scots poetry.’ – Lynn Valentine, poet

 

 

 

 

An Tìgear a Thàinig Gu Dinneir
By Judith Kerr; translated by Gillebrìde Mac ’IlleMhaoil

The doorbell rang just as Sophie and her mummy were sitting down to tea…

A beloved magical story of tigers, tea and ice cream.

A multi-million selling picture book no childhood should be without.

New Gaelic translation of Judith Kerr’s children’s classic The Tiger Who Came to Tea

‘Beloved by millions. And rightly so.’ – Daily Express

 

 

Paddington agus Iongantas na Nollaige
By Michael Bond; translated by Gillebrìde Mac ’IlleMhaoil

 

When the Browns take Paddington to the Christmas Grotto in a grand London department store, his journey
through the Winter Wonderland is full of surprises.

But the best surprise is from Santa. After all, who else could find the perfect present for a bear like Paddington.

‘I’ve always had great respect for Paddington… He’s a British Institution.’ – Stephen Fry
‘It’s always great when a book is translated into Gaelic that the children would be familiar with.’ – Head Teacher, Gaelic Medium Primary, Highland Council

 

 

A’ Hobat (The Hobbit)
By J. R. R. Tokien; translated by Moray Watson

 

The beloved fantasy classic for readers of all ages, about a hobbit called Bilbo Baggins who is whisked off on an unexpected journey by Gandalf the wizard and a company of thirteen dwarves. The Hobbit is a tale of high adventure, undertaken by a company of dwarves in search of dragon-guarded gold. A reluctant partner in this perilous quest is Bilbo Baggins, a comfort-loving unambitious hobbit, who surprises even himself by his resourcefulness and skill as a burglar. Encounters with trolls, goblins, dwarves, elves and giant spiders, conversations with the dragon, Smaug, and a rather unwilling presence at the Battle of Five Armies are just some of the adventures that befall Bilbo. Bilbo Baggins has taken his place among the ranks of the immortals of children’s fiction.

Written by Professor Tolkien for his own children, The Hobbit met with instant critical acclaim when published. Now the book is available for the first time in Gaelic, in a superb translation by Professor Moray Watson. The book includes all the drawings and maps by the author.

 

 

Draoidh Drùidhteach Oz (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz)
By L. Frank Baum; translated by Sgàire Uallas

 

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is L. Frank Baum’s story of a little girl named Dorothy, who with her dog Toto is carried by a tornado from Kansas to the strange and beautiful land of Oz. Here she decides to visit the Emerald City to ask its ruler, a wizard called Oz, to send her back home again. On the way she meets a Scarecrow, who is in search of brains; a Tin Woodman, who wishes to have a heart; and a Cowardly Lion, whose one desire is to possess courage. The little party encounter many dangers and marvelous adventures on the way, but reach the Emerald City in safety, their success being due to the thoughtfulness of the Scarecrow, the tender care of the Tin Woodman, and the fearlessness of the Cowardly Lion. This is the book that inspired the famous 1939 film — which differs from the original book in quite a few ways!

 

 

 

 

Bha Siud ann Reimhid
Edited by Lisa Storey

 

Newly updated, 21st Century edition of classic 1975 Scottish Gaelic folklore collection. Aimed at both adults and children. Nine Scottish Gaelic tales compiled and presented by Lisa Storey. Acclaimed broadcaster Angela MacEachen (author of new introduction to the 2025 publication) says:

‘Bringing up a Gaelic-speaking family in Edinburgh, if there is one book which ensured intergenerational transmission – passing Gaelic on to my children, and now my grandchildren – I can confidently say that it is, most certainly, this one. Never tiring of these marvellous traditional tales – for all ages – and their natural idiom and turn of phrase, publishing an updated version of this collection means that we can continue to enjoy these stories for years to come.’

 

 

Ailig agus an Dalek Gàidhlig
By Shelagh Chaimbeul

 

Ailig is an 8-year-old boy who loves Dr Who. When his teacher arranges a Halloween party in school, Ailig knows that he wants to dress up as a Dalek. There’s only one problem though – his teacher says that the children must dress up as characters who speak Gaelic. Ailig’s mum offers to make him a Spàgan costume (Spàgan is the Gaelic translation of the ‘Monster’ books) but he is determined to go as a Dalek. They reach a compromise – if Ailig can find a Gaelic word for ‘Exterminate’ his mum will let him go to the party as a Dalek.

 

 

 

 

Moilidh agus Doilidh
By Maoilios Caimbeul

 

Join Moilidh, an orphan lamb, and Doilidh, a wise sheep and keeper of ancient tales, as they journey through a landscape interwoven with the heavy history of the Highland Clearances. As the sheep travel through Sutherland, the Isle of Skye and the Hebrides, Doilidh tells the stories passed on to her by her ancestors.

 

 

Iomall
By Alistair Paul

 

Iomall is a collection of science-fiction short stories. With tales of other wordly creatures and people trapped in time, these stories dwell on the peculiar, taking readers on a journey out of time and space.

 

 

 

 

 

An Staran: Rosg Gàidhlig le Ruaraidh MacThòmais
Edited by Dr Petra Poncarová

This book comprises a selection of the Gaelic prose writings of Prof Derick Thomson (1921 – 2012). As well as being one of the most important Gaelic poets of the 20th century, Thomson, as the publisher and editor of the quarterly ‘Gairm’, shaped the development of Gaelic writing in the post-war period.

As an anthology of short stories, essays, reviews, travelogues and other genres of writing, the book aims to showcase lesser known aspects of Thomson as a writer – for example his skilful use of language, sharp intellect, his commitment to Gaelic and to Scotland and his incisive wit. There is also a short biographical introduction to Thomson.

The compiler and editor of the collection, Dr Petra Johana Poncarová, is an academic writer and researcher whose focus is on Scottish Literature and Culture, including modern writing in Gaelic.

 

 

 

Arnol Blackhouse: Official Souvenir Guide
By Historic Scotland

This dual-language guide explores the rich history of the atmospheric Arnol Blackhouse and township on the Isle of Lewis – a history which reaches back over 2,000 years. The houses that we see today tell the story of life in the Western Isles over the last few centuries.

With side-by-side text in Gaelic and English, this new book allows people to explore this remarkable place, the importance of Gaelic culture and language, and to find out what we can learn from the traditions of the past in shaping a sustainable future.

We’re very much looking forward to visiting the National Galleries of Scotland’s exhibition on James VI & I at the Portrait Gallery opening in late April. And we’re here to give you a wee preview not only of the exhibition, but of the excellent book that accompanies it.

 

Art & Court of James VI & I
By Kate Anderson, with Catriona Murray, Jemma Field, Anna Groundwater, Karen Hearn and Liz Louis
Published by National Galleries Scotland

 

History has not been kind to james vi of Scotland and I of England and Ireland. For many, he has fallen between the cracks of the reigns of his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, and his son Charles I, overshadowed by their contentious and heavily romanticised legacies. Both James’s reign and character were heavily criticised in the seventeenth century by writers, notably Sir Anthony Weldon. Published posthumously in 1650, the pejorative account of James’s physical appearance claimed that the king’s tongue was too big for his mouth, that he possessed weak legs and constantly fidgeted with his codpiece.1 Weldon was a former English courtier who had been dismissed from his position, and the memoir was anti-Scottish in sentiment and full of scandal and unfounded rumour. However, its legacy continued to impact on subsequent histories of the king for centuries. While recent scholarship has revised some of these inaccuracies and prejudices, misconceptions about James and his reign still exist. One of the aims of this book, and the exhibition it accompanies, is to reframe James and consider his life and reign in a wider context; they also seek to explore the extraordinary art, objects and culture that were produced during this period, and demonstrate how James, his family and members of the court used them to promote messages of status, power and allegiance.

This is not a detailed biography of James. His reign and character are incredibly complex, and while the narrative here is multi-layered, it does not set out to comprehensively examine the historical context of Scotland, England and Europe during this time. Instead, an object-based approach has been taken, with the visual and material culture of the Jacobean period being placed at the centre of this study, alongside an overview of some of the key individuals and events that shaped the king. In an attempt to address the imbalance of scholarly attention that the Scottish and English courts have received over the years, a concerted effort has been made to highlight James’s Scottish period. However, it is too simplistic to directly compare the artistic quality and output of the two courts, as the political, religious and economic climate in Scotland during James’s early life had a major impact on the development of the country’s cultural productivity.

This book has been published to accompany the exhibition The World of King James VI and I. It is hoped, however, that the essays and catalogue will have a legacy beyond the exhibition. Many of the artworks and objects in the exhibition are published here for the first time.

 

 

 

Art & Court of James VI & I by Kate Anderson, with Catriona Murray, Jemma Field, Anna Groundwater, Karen Hearn and Liz Louis, is published by National Galleries Scotland, priced £24.99.