THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

Line by Line: Scotland is an illustrated guide to the country’s railway, showcasing a collection of images captured over around twenty years. A celebration of both beautiful scenery and elegant engineering, it documents a variety of interesting rail traffic and will appeal to both local enthusiasts and those further afield.Featuring previously unpublished images that pay testament to Neil Gibson’s keen eye for a great shot, this is terrific record of the railways of Scotland.

Alchemists sought gold in it. David Bowie refrigerated it to ward off evil. In the trenches of Ypres soldiers used it as a gas mask, whereas modern-day terrorists add it to home-made explosives. All the Fullers, Tuckers and Walkers in the phonebook owe their names to it, and in 1969 four bags of it were left on the surface of the moon.Bought and sold, traded and transported, even carried to work in jugs, urine has made bread rise, beer foam and given us gunpowder, stained glass, Robin Hood’s tights and Vermeer’s Girl With A Pearl Earring. And we do produce an awful lot of it. Humans alone make almost enough to replace the entire contents of Loch Lomond every year. Add the incalculable volume contributed by the rest of the animal kingdom and it might soon displace a small ocean. No wonder it gets everywhere. In Life of Pee Sally Magnusson unveils the secret history of civilisation’s most unsavoury and unsung hero, and discovers how our urine footprint is just as indelible as our carbon one.

This is a story about uncovering the things that really matter, and discovering what makes us feel alive. It is a story about finding that inner strength and resilience, and never giving up hope.

Eight years ago, Kathleen Hart was diagnosed with breast cancer. Further complications led to a protracted recovery and months spent in hospital, where Kathleen had to learn how to walk again. While recuperating, she came across a small whitewashed cottage for sale in Wigtown, Scotland. Driving hundreds of miles on nothing more than a few photographs and an inkling, she bought it that very same day, and named it Devorgilla after the formidable 13th century Scottish princess.

Devorgilla Days is the story of how Kathleen left behind her old life to begin again in Scotland’s book capital. From renovating her cottage to exploring the seemingly quiet, but actually bustling town, she encounters a whole community of book lovers, beekeepers, artists and writers – and Lobster Fishermen. Kathleen starts wild swimming, a ritual that brings peace and clarity to her mind as her body heals. And, with the support of her virtual worldwide community who know her as PoshPedlar on Instagram, she rebuilds her life again.

Heartwarming and deeply moving, Devorgilla Days is an inspiring tale of one woman’s remarkable journey, a celebration of community, and a call-to-arms for anyone who has ever dreamt of starting over.

Could you condemn one child to save another?

In a near-future Europe fracturing under climate change and far-right politics, biologist Lina Stephenson works in the remote Rila Mountains, safely away from London State.

When an old enemy dies, Lina’s dangerous past resurfaces, putting her family’s lives at risk. Trapped with her vulnerable sister alongside the dead man’s family, Lina is facing pressure from all sides: her enemy’s eldest son is determined to destroy her in his search for vengeance, whilst his youngest carries a sinister secret…

…But the forest is hiding its own threats and as a catastrophic storm closes in, Lina realises that if she is to save her family, she must become a monster.

Rose lives with her parents in a small cottage in the forest. Her family are poor and hardworking, and Rose yearns for fun, friendship and flowers.

One Midsummer’s Day, walking wearily home, Rose hears beautiful singing and follows the joyful sound deep into the trees. As she listens, a flurry of fairies bursts out of a tiny door in the side of a hill! One of the fairies invites Rose to join their party.

Entering the fairy world, Rose is enchanted with her new friends and gladly joins in with their Midsummer song. Will she ever want to leave?

Inspired by traditional Scottish stories of fairy folk, celebrated storyteller Janis Mackay weaves a magical tale that will capture any child’s imagination. Ruchi Mhasane’s delightful illustrations sparkle with joy and vitality.

The Fairy Song is a delightful new book from the creators of much-loved traditional Scottish tale The Selkie Girl.

Naranjas is Tom Pow’s first full collection, since the thematic explorations of Dear Alice – Narratives of Madness (2009), A Wild Adventure – Thomas Watling, Dumfries Convict Forger (2014) and Concerning the Atlas of Scotland (2014).

Like all his work, the poems here are imprinted with landscapes, relationships and memories, but they also show how encounters with paintings, with reading and with history, through imaginative sympathy, can be transformed into personal lived experiences. The publication of Naranjas, marking Pow’s seventieth year, shows him still writing poems “alive to the sounds, smells, noises and ironies of life,” as Jim Burns commented of Red Letter Day (1996) in Ambit. But there is an urgency underlying the poems in this present work, as they seek better to understand how people live “in the green bone-yards of our world”.

Magic. Mystery. 

And a couple of masterful sleuths.

Smithers and Wing are partners (and wives) in supernatural crime-solving. Smithers is a magician ousted from the old guard and Wing is a detective who turned her back on the force. Together they haunt the back streets of Edinburgh, putting the bumps back to rest – for a fee.

But Edinburgh is eerie quiet and that’s bad for business. The unquiet dead are uncharacteristically hushed, the demons are lethargic and the ghosts have found new hobbies. No one seems to need supernatural supervision and S&W are taking on new work.

With no other cases coming their way, they take on the cool and getting colder case of Catriona Hewitt, a missing school girl.

With the help of her unconventional school teacher, Smithers and Wing begin to work the case, and find out just how much Catriona Hewitt has been hiding.

It’s not long before the pair realise they must face their own history before they can find the missing girl.

THINGS ARE AGAINST US is the first collection of essays from Booker Prize-shortlisted author Lucy Ellmann. It is everything you might expect from such a fiery writer which is to say, entirely unexpected. Provocative, smart, angry, wise, and very, very funny, the essays in Things Are Against Us cover everything – from feminism to environmental catastrophe; labour strikes to sex strikes; Little House On The Prairie to Donald Trump. Lucy calls for a moratorium on air travel (‘You’d think a global pandemic would be an opportunity to reconsider the whole crazy business’). She rails against bras (‘Men have managed to eroticise bras, but THEY DON’T HAVE TO WEAR THEM’). She gives Agatha Christie short shrift (‘atrocious but ideal for people with colds’). And she pleads for sanity in a world that – well. A world that has spent four years in the company of Donald Trump. (‘That big fat loser of a president, that nasty, sick, terrible, lowly, truly pathetic, reckless, sad, weak, lazy, incompetent, third-rate, clueless, not smart, dumb as a rock, all talk, wacko, fourthrate goofball and all-round low-life’).

Things Are Against Us is electric. It’s vital. These are essays bursting with energy, and reading them feels like sticking your hand in the mains socket. Lucy Ellmann is the writer we need to guide us through these crazy times.

Patient Dignity is a transnational collection of ‘Pandemic Poems’ and paintings that, among other things, compares India with Scotland. Vibha’s paintings go hand in hand with Bashabi’s evocative poetry.

‘I don’t have to feel guilty about sitting in my chair as night falls over Scapa Flow at three in the afternoon. It feels north and other and special and I think about the Neolithic folk in their houses at Skara Brae, closing the flaps and gathering round the fire, safe and secure for the night. I think they will have loved it too.’

After moving permanently to the island he’s always dreamed of, Richard Clubley here sets out to capture the experience of life on Orkney, from the history of Neolithic sites to a future in renewable energy, telling the stories of countless Orcadians along the way. Determined to travel further afield than his home on Mainland, Richard takes to the Outer Islands to meet the people who live there and tell their stories. Orkney: A Special Way of Life is a delight for any lover of Scotland’s remote places, filled with rich descriptions of the islands.

As the old chemical works in Leith are demolished a long deceased body encrusted in phosphate rock is discovered. Seated at a card table he has ten objects laid out in front of him. Whose body is it? How did he die and what is the significance of the objects?

Written entirely in East coast Scots A Working Class State of Mind, the debut book by Colin Burnett, brings the everyday reality and language of life in Scotland to the surface.

Colin’s fiction takes themes in the social sciences and animates them in vivid ethnographic portrayals of what it means to be working class in Scotland today.

Delving into the tragic exploits of Aldo as well as his long time suffering best friends Dougie and Craig, the book follows these and other characters as they make their way in a city more divided along class lines than ever before.

Cullrothes, in the Scottish Highlands, where Innes hides a terrible secret from his girlfriend Alice, a gorgeous, cheating, lying schoolteacher. In the same village, Donald is the aggressive distillery owner, who floods the country with narcotics alongside his single malt; when his son goes missing, he becomes haunted by an anonymous American investor intent on purchasing the Cullrothes Distillery by any means necessary. Schoolgirl Jessie is trying to get the grades to escape to the mainland, while Grandpa counts the days left in his life.

This is a place where mountains are immense and the loch freezes in winter. A place with only one road in and out. With long storms and furious midges and a terrible phone signal. The police are compromised, the journalists are scum, and the innocent folk of Cullrothes tangle themselves in a fermenting barrel of suspicion, malice and lies.

The Mash House uses multiple narratives to weave together the parallel lives of individuals in the village. Each fractured by the fears and uncertainty in their own minds.

Cath is a photographer hoping to go freelance, working in a record shop to pay the rent and eking out her time with her manager Steve. He thinks her photography is detective work, drawing attention to things that would otherwise pass unseen and maybe he’s right . . .

Starting work on her new project – photographing murder houses – she returns to the island where she grew up for the first time since she left for Glasgow when she was just eighteen. The Isle of Bute is embedded in her identity, the draughty house that overlooked the bay, the feeling of being nowhere, the memory of her childhood friend Shirley Craigie and the devastating familicide of her family by the father, John Craigie.

Arriving at the Craigie house, Cath finds that it’s occupied by Financial Analyst Alice Rahman. Her bid to escape the city lifestyle, the anxiety she felt in that world, led her to leave London and settle on the island. The strangeness of the situation brings them closer, leading them to reinvestigate the Craigie murder. Now, within the walls of the Craigie house, Cath can uncover the nefarious truths and curious nature of John Craigie: his hidden obsession with the work of Richard Dadd and the local myths of the fairy folk.

The Good Neighbours is an enquiry into the unknowability of the past and our attempts to make events fit our need to interpret them; the fallibility of recollection; the power of myths in shaping human narratives. Nina Allan skilfully weaves the imagined and the real to create a magically haunting story of memory, obsession and the liminal spaces that our minds frequent to escape trauma.

Enjoy two complimentary tracks, The Highland Rambler and The Bees of Maggieknockater when you buy your copy.

The book is accompanied by two CDs: one CD of new recordings by James Coutts and his Scottish Dance Band and a second CD, a re-releasing RSCDS archive recordings.

Jigs 

The Bees of Maggieknockater
The Cranberry Tart
The Dancing Master
Hooper’s Jig
Ian Powrie’s Farewell to Auchterarder
Joie de Vivre
Pelorus Jack
Postie’s Jig
Torridon Lassies
The White Heather Jig

Reels 

The Black Mountain Reel
Bratach Bana
Da Rain Dancin’
The Earl of Mansfield
The Highland Rambler
The Irish Rover
J.B. Milne
Mairi’s Wedding
Miss Johnstone of Ardrossan
Shiftin’ Bobbins

Strathspeys 

Asilomar Romantic
Cherrybank Gardens
Culla Bay
Delvine Side
The Dream Catcher
The Gentleman
MacDonald of the Isles
The Minister on the Loch
Miss Milligan’s Strathspey
The Wind on Loch Fyne

A facsimile of the Hill Manuscript, originally published privately in 2009 by the Hill Manuscript Group (Dr. Alastair MacFadyen, Alan Macpherson and Anita Mackenzie, is scheduled for a reprint. The Hill MS is one of the most important surviving manuscripts about Scottish Traditional Dance. It dates from 1841 and was compiled by Frederick Hill of Alford. Very little is known about Frederick Hill other than that he was born in Hammersmith in London, was a Tailor and Clothier by trade and that he settled in Clatt in Aberdeenshire when aged about 25, subsequently moving to Alford a nearby village.

The original notebook is highly likely to have been his aide-memoire; recording the instructions for the dances he had been taught (probably by itinerant dancing masters). The notebook is interesting, in that it includes Quadrilles, Country Dances and High or Step Dances, and is the source of several dances published by the Royal Scottish Country Dance Society. The reproduced notebook comprises 40 scanned images from the original manuscript.

There’s nothing romantic about dating…A Glasgow Kiss [n.]A headbutt or a strike with the head to someone’s sensitive areaMeet Zara Smith: 29, single and muddling her way through life as a trainee nurse in Glasgow. With 30 fast approaching, she’s determined to do whatever it takes to find love – or at least someone to sext! Cheered on by best friends Ashley and Raj, Zara embarks on a string of dating escapades that are as hilarious as they are disastrous. From online dating to blind dates, hometown hook-ups to flirty bartenders, nothing is off limits.But when Dr Tom Adams, aka Sugar Daddy, shows interest, it’s a game-changing moment. Zara has had a crush on Tom since her very first day at the aesthetics clinic she works at part-time. As things heat up between them, Zara can’t help but wonder: is this it? Or is it another disaster waiting to happen?Filthy, hilarious and painfully relatable, Zara Smith is Bridget Jones for the millennial generation, from the writer of the Sex in the Glasgow City blog. Fans of Fleabag, Girls and Lucy Vine will love A Glasgow Kiss.

Quentin Durward, an archer and mercenary, gains the favor of Louis XI of France and the love of the beautiful Burgundian heiress, Isabelle de Croye. This is a captivating tale full of action, adventure and unexpected challenge. A poor Scotsman named Quentin Durward travels to France to find military work. He joins the royal party of King Louis XI, who is at odds with Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. When the king is attacked by a boar, Quentin leaps into action and saves his life. This leads to a fateful assignment that will change his life forever. Quentin is charged with protecting Isabelle de Croye, an heiress being targeted by Charles. While together, Quentin and Isabelle unexpectedly fall in love, upsetting the duke’s treacherous plans.Quentin Durward is a historical novel driven by larger-than-life characters. Each one plays a pivotal role in the layered narrative. Like many of Scott’s works, Quentin Durward balances action, morality and an unforgettable story. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Quentin Durward is both modern and readable.

After ascending to the throne at a young age, and ruling Protestant subjects while personally practicing Catholicism, Mary, Queen of the Scots was hardly given a chance to be an influential leader. Other rulers, and sometimes her own subjects, looked down on her for her religious differences. Which is why, Queen Mary’s relatives, her Protestant subjects, and Lady Lochlevan locked her in Lochlevan castle at their first chance. Having been raised in solitude, and often sent away for extended stays the castle, Mary had little patience for her imprisonment. Stuck there with her ladies-in-waiting, Mary bides her time, planning an escape. Meanwhile, Roland Graeme, a young man with mysterious origins visits the castle and immediately falls in love with Catherine, Mary’s lady-in-waiting. However, the love affair grows complicated when Roland gets into a feud with Catherine’s twin brother. While Roland struggles with his feelings, Catherine and Mary plan a daring escape, recruiting the help of a surprising ally. Sequel to The Monastery, Sir Walter Scott’s The Abbot is a historical adventure novel. First published two-hundred years ago in 1820, The Abbot earned commercial success and the approval of critics, evening ranking as high as one of Scott’s most popular novels, Waverley. Praised for its outstanding character portrayals, critics were enamored by Catherine’s striking depiction and Queen Mary’s humorous sarcasm. With the portrayal of an iconic and popular royal, along with the impressive description of the setting, this work of historical fiction is perfect for the modern reader. Featuring plot twists, betrayals, battles, romance, and drama, Sir Walter Scott’s The Abbot is full of exciting action and rich prose that remains to entertain even modern audiences. This edition of The Abbot by Sir Walter Scott now features a new, eye-catching cover design and is printed in a font that is both modern and readable. With these accommodations, this edition of The Abbot crafts an accessible and pleasant reading experience for modern audiences while restoring the original mastery and drama of Sir Walter Scott’s literature.