THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

The Bone Library examines and interprets all of human life. The poems here respond to broader themes of identity, of place, of love and the unloved. Written in the old Dick Vet Bone Library during the author’s time as writer in residence there, this is a vivid exploration that cuts to the very core of what it is to be alive. It is also a collection that is honest and carries with it, always, an undertow of elegy.

One of the most famous queens in history, Mary Stuart lived in her homeland for just twelve years: as a dauntless child who laughed at her friends’ seasickness as they sailed to safety in France and later, on her return as a 18-year-old widow to take control of a nation riven with factions, dissent and religious strife. Brief though her time in Scotland was, her experience profoundly influenced who she was and what happened to her.In this book, Rosemary Goring tells the story of Mary’s Scottish years through the often dramatic and atmospheric locations and settings where the events that shaped her life took place and also examines the part Scotland, and its tumultuous court and culture, played in her downfall. Whether or not Mary Stuart emerges blameless or guilty, in this evocative retelling she can be seen for who she really was.

Essays on Politics and Society brings together the most significant writings on the topic by the acclaimed Victorian historian, social critic, and essayist Thomas Carlyle. This volume includes some of his most well-known and influential pieces, such as “Characteristics” and “Chartism.” In keeping with the Norman and Charlotte Strouse Edition of the Writings of Thomas Carlyle, these essays are accompanied by a thorough historical introduction to the material, extensive notes providing historical and cultural context while expanding on references and allusions, and a textual apparatus that carefully details and explains the editorial decisions made in reconciling the editions of each essay.

LONGLISTED FOR THE HIGHLAND BOOK PRIZEIn frantic flight from the Vietnam War, Jay Parini leaves the United States for Scotland. There, through unlikely circumstances, he meets famed Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges. The pair embark on a trip to the Scottish Highlands, and on the way the charmingly garrulous Borges takes Parini on a grand tour of western literature and ideas while promising to teach him about love and poetry.Borges and Me is a classic road novel, based on true events. It’s also a magical tour of an era – like our own – in which uncertainties abound, and when – as ever – it’s the young and the old who hear voices and dream dreams.

‘One of those books that makes you feel good about being alive!’In the imposing Glen Carrick House overlooking Scotland’s famous Loch Ness, lives eighty-eight-year-old Mimi McKinlay, cared for by her three adult sons. Hamish has inherited his mother’s musical talents, Fin is the responsible brother, and Angus has the complicated and brooding personality to match his dashing good looks.But what all the brothers share is a concern that their beloved mother is living in her memories of her days on stage, while letting her present days pass her by.Jess Oliver is at a turning point. Amicably divorced after years of being married, this trip to the Highlands is a first taste of independence. It isn’t long before the beauty and hospitality of Scotland captures her heart.When Mimi and Jess’s paths cross, a friendship is formed that will change both women’s lives. And as together they find ways to look forward instead of to the past, long forgotten dreams are within reach, and every new day is fresh with possibilities.Take a trip to the Highlands with Judy Leigh for an unforgettable story of glorious pasts and fabulous futures, of love, friendship, family and fun. The perfect feel-good novel for all fans of Dawn French, Dee Macdonald and Cathy Hopkins.Readers love Judy Leigh:’Loved this from cover to cover, pity I can only give this 5 stars as it deserves far more.”The story’s simply wonderful, the theme of second chances will resonate whatever your age, there’s something for everyone among the characters, and I do defy anyone not to have a tear in their eye at the perfect ending.”With brilliant characters and hilarious antics, this is definitely a cosy read you’ll not want to miss.”A lovely read of how life doesn’t just end because your getting old.”A great feel-good and fun story that made me laugh and root for the characters.’Praise for Judy Leigh:’Brilliantly funny, emotional and uplifting’ Miranda Dickinson’Lovely . . . a book that assures that life is far from over at seventy’ Cathy Hopkins bestselling author of The Kicking the Bucket List’Brimming with warmth, humour and a love of life… a wonderful escapade’ Fiona Gibson

This beautifully written autobiography is a story of transformation. It reveals the secret worlds and people in Scottish art, and vividly conjures global changes over this twenty-five-year period which affected everything, even this beautiful glen. At its heart is how to survive and find a place in a family of artists and how to support this community of individuals.It begins with the enigmatic Black Allan opening the door of a disused church and the conversion of this old kirk into an art gallery with next to no money. Twenty-five years later, Kilmorack Gallery will be among the top commercial galleries in Scotland, with a stable of over sixty leading Scottish artists. It will have weathered the financial crash of 2008 and the pandemic of 2020, defying history, tradition and the commodification of art in the age of celebrity. The book starts as a coming-of-age story and ends with a powerful environmental call for change – a call for awakening.We are introduced to artists as they join the gallery’s stable: from Gerald Laing (pop artist from the 1960s,) Edinburgh’s dark and satirical Robert Powell and the ethereal northern artists. We also meet the gallery’s clients.

A BBC Radio collection of full-cast dramatisations, radio plays and short stories by the bestselling crime writerAward-winning ‘Queen of Crime’ Val McDermid has sold over 17 million books worldwide, and been translated into over 40 languages. Her ‘Wire in the Blood’ series was adapted for TV, starring Robson Green and Hermione Norris, and ran for six seasons. Included here are full-cast adaptations of several of her acclaimed novels, as well as four tales specially written for BBC Radio.Clean Break – When a Monet is stolen from a stately home where she’d arranged the security, Manchester-based PI Kate Brannigan sets off on a chase across Europe that brings her face-to-face with organised crime. Starring Charlotte Coleman.The Right Chemistry – Jane Hazelgrove stars in this follow-up to Clean Break, which sees Kate embroiled in a deadly case of industrial sabotage, blackmail, counterfeiting and murder.The Distant Echo- Late one night in the snow, four students stumble upon the body of a dead girl. 25 years later, the police launch a cold-case review of the unsolved murder – but is the killing over? A thrilling dramatisation of the first ‘Karen Pirie’ novel, starring Jimmy Chisholm, John-Paul Hurley and Claire Knight.Village SOS- Investigating a murder in the sleepy Northumbrian village of Shilwick, DCI Marion Bettany and DS John Hodgson find the residents curiously reluctant to help. Helen Baxendale and David Seddon star as the detective duo.Resistance – Midsummer, and 150,000 revellers are partying at the Solstice music festival. But then people start to get sick with a mystery illness: one that’s highly contagious and seemingly resistant to antibiotics… Gina McKee stars in this chilling, apocalyptic drama.I Remember Yesterday- A young woman haunts Edinburgh’s alleyways, seeking revenge to the ’70s strains of Donna Summer. Hannah Donaldson reads this spine-chilling ghost story.Same Crime, Next Year – Set in Harrogate, this gripping tale imagines the fallout from the torrid affair of two crime writers. Read by Siobhan Redmond.Text copyright (c) Val McDermid 1995 (Clean Break), 2003 (The Distant Echo), 2011 (Village SOS), 2013 (I Remember Yesterday), 2016 (Same Crime, Next Year), 2017 (Resistance)(c) 2022 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd. (P) 2022 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

Today, there are more borders in the world than ever before in human history. In this book James Crawford argues that our enduring obsession with borders has brought us to a crisis point: that we are entering the endgame of a process that began thousands of years ago, when we first started dividing up the earth.Beginning with the earliest known marker which denoted the end of one land and the beginning of the next, James follows the story of borders into our fragile and uncertain future – towards the virtual frontiers of the internet, and the shifting geography of a world beset by climate change. In the process, he travels to many borders old and new: from a melting border high in the glacial landscapes of the Austrian-Italian Alps to the only place on land where Europe and Africa meet; from the artist Banksy’s ‘Walled Off Hotel’ in the conflict-torn West Bank to the Sonoran Desert and the fault lines of the US/Mexico border..Combining history, travel and reportage, The Edge of the Plain explores how borders have grown and evolved to take control of our landscapes, our memories, our identities and our destinies. As nationalism, climate change, globalisation, technology and mass migration all collide with ever-hardening borders, something has to give. Can we let go of the lines that separate us? Or are we fated to repeat the mistakes of the past, as our angry, warming and segregated planet lurches towards catastrophe?

Reflecting on family, identity and nature, Belonging is a personal memoir about what it is to have and make a home. It is a love letter to nature, especially the northern landscapes of Scotland and the Scots pinewoods of Abernethy – home to standing dead trees known as snags, which support the overall health of the forest.Belonging is a book about how we are held in thrall to elements of our past. It speaks to the importance of attention and reflection, and will encourage us all to look and observe and ask questions of ourselves.Beautifully written and featuring Amanda Thomson’s artwork and photography throughout, it explores how place, language and family shape us and make us who we are.

The Party House by Lin Anderson is a deeply atmospheric psychological thriller set in the Scottish Highlands, for fans of Lucy Foley, Ruth Ware and Sarah Pearse’s The Sanatorium.Devastated by a recent pandemic brought in by outsiders, the villagers of Blackrig in the Scottish Highlands are outraged when they find that the nearby estate plans to reopen its luxury ‘party house’ to tourists.As animosity sparks amongst the locals, part of the property is damaged and, in the ensuing chaos, the body of a young girl is found in the wreck. Seventeen-year-old Ailsa Cummings went missing five years ago, never to be seen again – until now.The excavation of Ailsa’s remains ignites old suspicions cast on the men of this small community, including Greg, the estate’s gamekeeper. At the beginning of a burgeoning relationship with a new lover, Joanne, Greg is loath to discuss old wounds. Frightened by Greg’s reaction to the missing girl’s discovery, Joanne begins to doubt how well she knows this new man in her life. Then again, he’s not the only one with secrets in their volatile relationship . . .

Catch up on the latest from Mma Ramotswe, Mma Makutsi and other favourites in this new instalment of Alexander McCall Smith’s The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series.”Mma Ramotswe is a glorious creation” Mail on SundayMma Ramotswe knows she is very lucky indeed. She has a loving family, good friends and a thriving business doing what she enjoys most: helping people. But the latest mystery she is called upon to solve is distinctly trickier than it initially appears, and, of course, there’s plenty to handle in her personal life between Charlie and his new bride and Mma Makutsi and her talking shoes.In the end, Mma Ramotswe’s patience and common-sense will win out, and, without a doubt, all will be the better for it.”Full of delight” Sunday Herald”Hugely enjoyable” Sunday Times

Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, has been central to Scottish life and its history over the centuries. It is the seat of the Scottish government, the Scottish parliament, the supreme courts of Scotland, many national institutions, and a major educational, medical and financial centre. The Palace of Holyroodhouse is the official residence of the monarch in Scotland.The Old Town retains much of its medieval character and the Georgian New Town, with its regular facades and major neoclassical buildings by architects of the stature of Robert Adam, is one of the world’s most extensive examples of neoclassical towns. Numerous festivals attract visitors from all over the world and its eminent scientists, engineers, philosophers and writers are internationally renowned.In this book, author Jack Gillon brings together a superbly evocative collection of old postcards of Edinburgh. The 180 featured postcards celebrate the city’s achievements and distinctive character in the form of its public buildings, principal streets, and historic landmarks. Edinburgh: The Postcard Collection provides an invaluable visual record of the city’s past and a fascinating insight into the world of our ancestors.

In 2019, Jenna Watt took part in the stalking of a hind on the vast Highland estate of Corrour: part of an immersive attempt to understand the ideas that lie behind ‘rewilding’, and what it means emotionally and physically to participate in Scotland’s deer cull. Piece by piece and chapter by chapter she unravels the story of that one day spent hunting the hind, interlaced with her discovery that her ancestors were deer stalkers, game keepers and ghillies on a Highland estate, who once took part in now controversial land practices like muirburn, grouse shooting and species persecution.This exploration leads her into the complex and often conflict-ridden world of the rewilding movement. She meets the ‘Wolf Man’ of the Highlands, who wants to introduce the first wild wolves back into Scotland for over 300 years; a Danish billionaire who owns huge swathes of the Scottish landscape; landowners who are reintroducing species like beaver, ospreys and sea-eagles onto their estates; and a woman deer stalker, who is trying to introduce more women into the male-dominated world of stalking and game-keeping.In the process Jenna comes to better understand the meaning of ‘wildness’, the shifting baselines of ‘rewilding’, and, in a world beset by climate change and species extinction, how to cope, both as an individual and as a society, with the concept of ecological grief.

Scotland is a land of many languages – including Gaelic, Pictish, Brythonic, Norse, Anglo-Saxon and Modern English among them. The result is an often bewildering series of overlapping layers of place-names, difficult at times to understand and even pronounce. This book, featuring 8,000 names ranging from districts, towns and villages to rivers, lochs and mountains, is the essential guide to Scottish placenames, illustrating the extent to which Scotland’s languages were spoken over its territory.Placenames open up a window not only on to the geography of the country but on to its history, providing evidence not found in documented sources. In addition to an introduction on the history and nature of placenames in Scotland, this book contains a guide to Gaelic pronunciation, maps and suggestions for further reading in this fascinating subject.

It started and ended with a financial catastrophe. The Darien disaster of 1700 drove Scotland into union with England, but spawned the institutions which transformed Edinburgh into a global financial centre. The crash of 2008 wrecked the city’s two largest and oldest banks – and its reputation. In the three intervening centuries, Edinburgh became a hothouse of financial innovation, prudent banking, reliable insurance and smart investing. The face of the city changed too as money transformed it from medieval squalor to Georgian elegance.This is the story, not just of the institutions which were respected worldwide, but of the personalities too, such as the two hard-drinking Presbyterian ministers who founded the first actuarially-based pension fund; Sir Walter Scott, who faced financial ruin, but wrote his way out of it; the men who financed American railways and eastern rubber plantations with Scottish money; and Fred Goodwin, notorious CEO of RBS, who took the bank to be the biggest in the world, but crashed and burned in 2008.

Hey, America! is the story of how black music came from the margins of American life in the early twentieth century through to the mainstream under Barack Obama’s presidency and then was mobilised as a force for radical opposition to Donald Trump’s presidency. Embedded in the story is the triumph of black music over the many forces that had held it back – racism, segregation, undercapitalised record labels, media discrimination and political anxiety.Opening with President Obama’s tribute to Prince, the author takes us through the spat between Louis Armstrong and President Eisenhower, Eartha Kitt’s encounter with Lady Bird Johnson, the Vietnam War’s influence on soul, James Brown’s flirtation with Nixon, the impact of Hurricane Katrina, Ice-T’s ‘Cop Killer’ scandal, Public Enemy and the rise of hip-hop, the Washington Wives versus ‘porn rock’, Kanye West running for presidency and many, many others. The book concludes with the dramatic stand-off between Trump and the Black Lives Matter movement.

‘The Arctic’ in Don Paterson’s powerful new collection is the name of a bar frequented by the survivors of several kinds of apocalypse. The poems gathered here are as various as the clientele: elegies for the poet’s musician father; tales of the love lives of gods and the childhoods of psychopaths; troubled encounters between men and women; odes to movies and the male anatomy; studies of art and ambition, politics and parenthood. Other voices enter the fray in renderings of Cavafy, Montale and the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral. And in the fourth part of Paterson’s ongoing poem ‘The Alexandrian Library’, the poet-as-amateur scientist – from a weather station at the top of Ben Nevis to the cellar of The Arctic – bears witness to the imminence of man-made extinction. By turns urgent, railing and tender, these are poems of and for our times, by one of our most celebrated and formally adventurous writers.

LONGLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL FICTION’To tell the story of a country or a continent is surely a great and complex undertaking; but the story of a quiet, unnoticed place where there are few people, fewer memories and almost no reliable records – a place such as Glen Conach – may actually be harder to piece together. The hazier everything becomes, the more whatever facts there are become entangled with myth and legend. . .’Deep in the mountains of north-east Scotland lies Glen Conach, a place of secrets and memories, fable and history. In particular, it holds the stories of three different eras, separated by centuries yet linked by location, by an ancient manuscript and by echoes that travel across time.In ancient Pictland, the Christian hermit Conach contemplates God and nature, performs miracles and prepares himself for sacrifice. Long after his death, legends about him are set down by an unknown hand in the Book of Conach.Generations later, in the early nineteenth century, self-promoting antiquarian Charles Kirkliston Gibb is drawn to the Glen, and into the big house at the heart of its fragile community.In the present day, young Lachie whispers to Maja of a ghost he thinks he has seen. Reflecting on her long life, Maja believes him, for she is haunted by ghosts of her own.News of the Dead is a captivating exploration of refuge, retreat and the reception of strangers. It measures the space between the stories people tell of themselves – what they forget and what they invent – and the stories through which they may, or may not, be remembered.

A fun and practical guide to making your brain brilliant, from well-being expert Nicola Morgan.Build a brilliant brain with this fun and practical guide for young people from award-winning well-being expert Nicola Morgan. From the benefits of the right food, sleep and exercise, to how be creative, curious and resilient, discover the incredible science and top advice to make your brain the best it can be. Packed with fascinating facts and brain boosting activities, this illustrated guide gives you the power to build your brilliant brain!

The Walsingham Gambit provides the reader with a new and unique insight into the hidden history associated with the regicide of Mary, Queen of Scots. This hidden history is revealed in great detail by R. Kent Tiernan, who describes how the English deception planners led by Sir Francis Walsingham designed, engineered, and executed a complex seven-year operation to expand Queen Elizabeth I’s power by ending Mary’s life. Tiernan presents a counterintelligence analytical approach utilizing conspiracies and deception between two religious mortal enemies. Historians have explained what happened during this tumultuous period, but this book tells how it happened. Whether interested in history or deception, the reader will be well rewarded with an enhanced understanding of both. This book is a timeless must read for anyone interested in how Mary Stuart was entrapped by Walsingham’s gambit.