THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

About to get married, Mirabelle and her fiancé retired Superintendent Alan McGregor are torn about where they will settle but when a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity comes up to buy a secluded house on the banks of the Firth of Forth, they submit to getting permission from the local landlord. But that permission comes at a price and when a nun dies in mysterious circumstances at the Little Sisters of Gethsemane Convent nearby they are drafted to uncover what happened.

The case is unexceptional, that is what I know. A house full of stuff left behind by a dead woman, abandoned at the last . . .

When trauma cleaner Essie Pound makes a gruesome discovery in the derelict Edinburgh boarding house she is sent to clean, it brings her into contact with a young policewoman, Emily Noble, who has her own reasons to solve the case.

As the two women embark on a journey into the heart of a forgotten family, the investigation prompts fragmented memories of their own traumatic histories – something Emily has spent a lifetime attempting to bury, and Essie a lifetime trying to lay bare.

Emily Noble’s Disgrace is the third novel from Mary Paulson-Ellis, the bestselling author of The Other Mrs Walker, a Waterstones Scottish Book of the Year.

Edinburgh, 1850. This city will bleed you dry.

Dr Will Raven is a man seldom shocked by human remains, but even he is disturbed by the contents of a package washed up at the Port of Leith. Stranger still, a man Raven has long detested is pleading for his help to escape the hangman.

Back in the townhouse of Dr James Simpson, Sarah Fisher has set her sights on learning to practise medicine. Almost everyone seems intent on dissuading her from this ambition, but when word reaches her that a woman has recently obtained a medical degree despite her gender, Sarah decides to seek her out.

Raven’s efforts to prove his former adversary’s innocence are failing and he desperately needs Sarah’s help. Putting their feelings for one another aside, their investigations take them to both extremes of Edinburgh’s social divide, where they discover that wealth and status cannot alter a fate written in the blood.

The discovery of a human foot in an Edinburgh park, the inexplicable circumstances of a dying woman, and the missing daughter of Jenny’s violent ex-husband present the Skelf women with their most challenging – and deadly – cases yet…

Keeping on top of the family funeral directors’ and private-investigation businesses is no easy task for the Skelf women, and when matriarch Dorothy discovers a human foot while walking the dog, a perplexing case presents itself … with potentially deadly results.

Daughter Jenny and grand-daughter Hannah have their hands full too: The mysterious circumstances of a dying woman lead them into an unexpected family drama, Hannah’s new astrophysicist colleague claims he’s receiving messages from outer space, and the Skelf’s teenaged lodger has yet another devastating experience.

Nothing is clear as the women are immersed ever deeper in their most challenging cases yet. But when the daughter of Jenny’s violent and fugitive ex-husband goes missing without trace and a wild animal is spotted roaming Edinburgh’s parks, real danger presents itself, and all three Skelfs are in peril.

Taut, dark, warmly funny and unafraid to ask big questions – of us all – The Great Silence is the much-anticipated third instalment in the addictive, unforgettable Skelfs series, and the stakes are higher than ever.

Ten years of marriage.
Ten years of secrets.
An anniversary they’ll never forget.

Adam and Amelia are spending the weekend in the Scottish Highlands. The remote location is perfect for what they have planned.

But when their romantic trip takes a dark turn, they both start to wonder – can they trust the one they’re with?

Because every couple tells little white lies. Only for Adam and Amelia, the truth is far more dangerous.

Based on close archival research, Christian Weikop uncovers unknown and exciting narratives, as well as artist networks, concerning this provocative 1970 exhibition, held at ECA. The author has previously considered the British press reception of SGA in an article for Tate Papers, but this Studies in Photography-EUP book publication goes far beyond that article and any other scholarship on the exhibition by taking into account the contributions of all 35 artists based in Düsseldorf, and incorporating testimony of individuals who were involved in this landmark exhibition, or who were later engaged in archive exhibitions or recreation projects. Weikop explores the formation of the exhibition in the context of a late 1960s culture of protests and occupations, and demonstrates that SGA was a pivotal ‘Shock of the New’ moment that would leave its mark on art education.

Beyond the Swelkie is a collection of poetry and prose in English, Scots and Gaelic celebrating the centenary of George Mackay Brown. Its contributors are based in Orkney and across Scotland, each engages with the muse in their own way. The contributors include many award-winning poets. Beyond the Swelkie includes a foreword by Asif Khan, Director of the Scottish Poetry Library. The book’s cover incorporates the artist Sandy Moffat’s celebrated portrait of George Mackay Brown.

Willard, his mother, and his girlfriend Nyla have spent their entire lives in an endless procession, where daily survival is dictated by the ultimate imperative: obey the rules, or lose your place in the Line. Everything changes the day Willard’s mother dies and he finds a book hidden among her few belongings.

Line is speculative fiction at its most ambitious, leading the reader on a journey to make sense of a world that is ultimately not so different from our own.

A stunning debut from a major new voice in Irish literature.

Where does one language end and another begin? What happens to those people who find themselves not simply between languages but in states of transformation and translation? How do we speak, act, and live in these spaces where everything seems at once both promised and impossible?

Paul McQuade’s debut short story collection moves into this space between tongues – a play on the Scottish Gaelic word for translation, eadar-theangachadh. These stories span modern myth and the surreal, Europe, Asia, and North America, and take language and technology to their limit to map those strange places where people without voices find themselves.

‘Sometimes I wonder, if I had known that it was going to take me fourteen years to paint this painting of the Crucifixion with Douglas as Jesus, and what it would take for me to paint this painting, would I have been as happy as I was then?’

Susan Alison MacLeod, a Glasgow School of Art graduate with a dark sense of humour, first lays eyes on Douglas MacDougal at a party in 1988, and resolves to put him on the cross in the Crucifixion painting she’s been sketching out, but her desire to create ‘good’ art and a powerful, beautiful portrayal means that a final painting doesn’t see the light of day for fourteen years.

Over the same years, Douglas’s ever-more elaborately designed urine-based installations bring him increasing fame, prizes and commissions, while his modelling for Susan Alison, who continues to work pain and suffering on to the canvas, takes place mostly in the shadows. This Good Book is a wickedly funny, brilliantly observed novel that spins the moral compass and plays with notions of creating art.

Hannah Richards, former code-breaker at Bletchley Park and gay before the time of liberation, is recovering from a mind broken by the strain of secrecy. With the Cuban missile crisis looming, she’s one of a group of patients taken to Tharn, an island famed for its fantastic knitwear. Supervised by experimental psychologist Doctor Frederickson, their home will be the Knitting Factory, a Studio 54 for the Highlands, run by the mysterious Madame Jeanne. The Madame’s daring concepts in knitwear have brought her into conflict with the native knitters, most notably the formidable Mrs Montgomery. Negotiating the tensions of the island Hannah is convinced Tharn is about to be invaded by Russian agents. Not knowing who to trust, least of all herself, she confronts technicolour Highlanders and mushroom-induced hallucinations, assisted by East End starlet, Elsie Brixton and a psychotic sheep, Bette in a Whisky Galore! for fans of Mad Men.

“Disillusioned with life in Glasgow, I sold everything I had and left for a new life in a remote fishing village in Japan. I knew nothing of the language or the new land that I would call home for the next seven years.”

An experimental memoir written entirely on John’s phone, Fish Town is a powerhouse of raw emotions. It reads like a book of poetry or a long text message. In the tone of Bukowski’s Post Office, the book captures the experiences of a Scottish man in Japan with humor, wit, honesty, and by all means without an ounce of political correctness.

2019 – It’s Hannah Greenshields’s first day at Memory Lane, a memory clinic in the centre of Edinburgh. She soon learns that Memory Lane possesses advanced technology which allows clients to relive their favourite memories for a substantial fee.

1975 – John Valentine, a Memory Lane client, is reliving his wedding day over and over again, hoping to change one key event he can’t forget. However, as proceedings become less and less familiar, John realises his memory isn’t such a safe place after all.

When Hannah and John’s paths meet, they must work together to get John back to the real world before it’s too late.

In a departure from Ross’s recent work – The Everliving Memory of John Valentine combines elements of speculative fiction in a novel that is all too believable…

When Mark Darling is fifteen years old, he is the golden boy, captain of the school football team, admired by all who know him. Until he kills his best friend in a freak accident.

He spends the next decade drifting between the therapy couch and dead-end pursuits. Then along comes Sadie. A mender by nature, she tries her best to fix him, and has enough energy to carry them both through the next few years.

One evening, Mark bumps into an old schoolfriend, Ruby. She saw the accident first hand. He is pulled towards her by a force stronger than logic: the universal need to reconcile one’s childhood wounds. This is his chance to, once again, feel the enveloping warmth of unconditional love. But can he leave behind the woman who rescued him from the pit of despair, the wife he loves? His unborn child?

This is a story about how childhood experience can profoundly impact how we behave as adults. It’s a story about betrayal, infidelity and how we often blinker ourselves to see a version of the truth that is more palatable to us.

Fourteen stories, ranging from science fiction to weird, mixing future scenarios (on and off-Earth) and alternate realities, but in fact, they are essentially about one thing: love and its malcontents.

A man who refuses to let death erase the memories of his loved ones; two time-travellers leaping through the aeons in a literal love-and-death relationship; a murderer in love with the ghost of his prey – and more.

What would you do for love? What lengths, in space and time, would you go to? These characters have done it all.

An Eye For An Eye For An Eye explores what it means to grow up a girl, and how this experience intersects with disability and visual impairment. These poems concern themselves with looking: looking back over a childhood, looking again at what’s in front of us, and looking forward to possible futures. They visit girlhood and myth, blindness and friendship. They celebrate the freedom, shame, and awkwardness of coming to terms with our own bodies, and they ask what it means to look different and see differently.

A brand new batty picture book from the pen of award-winning author of the hugely successful World of Norm book series, Jonathan Meres.

When Little Bat cant sleep one morning, Middle Bat and Big Bat are quick to tease and accuse him of being scared of the light. Theres only one thing for it. Little Bat will have to leave the old oak tree, all by himself, and prove them wrong. But will he come face to face with the Bogey Bat? Is Little Bat really a… Scaredy Bat? A story about letting go and conquering your fears.

Home is many people and places and languages, some separated by oceans.

Nina Mingya Powles first learned to swim in Borneo – where her mother was born and her grandfather studied freshwater fish. There, the local swimming pool became her first body of water. Through her life there have been others that have meant different things, but have still been, in their own way, home: from the wild coastline of New Zealand to a pond in northwest London.

This lyrical collection of interconnected essays explores the bodies of water that separate and connect us, as well as everything from migration, food, family, earthquakes and the ancient lunisolar calendar to butterflies. In powerful prose, Small Bodies of Water weaves together personal memories, dreams and nature writing. It reflects on a girlhood spent growing up between two cultures, and explores what it means to belong.

‘A tale I have for you.’

Embra, winter of 1574. Queen Mary has fled Scotland, to raise an army from the French. Her son and heir, Jamie is held under protection in Stirling Castle. John Knox is dead. The people are unmoored and lurching under the uncertain governance of this riven land. It’s a deadly time for young student Will Fowler, short of stature, low of birth but mightily ambitious, to make his name.

Fowler has found himself where the scorch marks of the martyrs burned at the stake can be seen on every street, where differences in doctrine can prove fatal, where the feuds of great families pull innocents into their bloody realm. There he befriends the austere stick-wielding philosopher Tom Nicolson, son of a fishing family whose sister Rose, untutored, brilliant and exceedingly beautiful exhibits a free-thinking mind that can only bring danger upon her and her admirers.
The lowly students are adept at attracting the attentions of the rich and powerful, not least Walter Scott, brave and ruthless heir to Branxholm and Buccleuch, who is set on exploiting the civil wars to further his political and dynastic ambitions. His friendship and patronage will lead Will to the to the very centre of a conspiracy that will determine who will take Scotland’s crown.

Rose Nicolson is a vivid, passionate and unforgettable novel of this most dramatic period of Scotland’s history, told by a character whose rise mirrors the conflicts he narrates, the battles between faith and reason, love and friendship, self-interest and loyalty. It confirms Andrew Greig as one of the great contemporary writers of fiction.

THE EPIC ADVENTURE OF A TEENY-TINY HEROThis is a tale of mice and magic.It is also a tale of great love (of cheese) and great danger. And learning the lesson that what matters most – when it comes to cheese and life – is not how strongly you smell but how strong you are on the inside.