THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

An omen of spirits dance across the sky. A lonely woman befriends a sea witch as the world ends. The last whale in the world travels north in search of hope. A grandmother seeks revenge on the sea monster that took her family.

Dark Crescent is a collection of seasonal tales inspired by Scottish folklore, landscapes, superstitions, and omens. In this book, readers will find reinterpretations of common folklore creatures and phenomenon, like the Kelpie, Selkie, and Will-o’-the-Wisps, as well as lesser known, such as the Sea Mither, Ceasg, Marool, Sluagh, Ghillie Dhu, Nuckelavee, Baobhan Sith, and The Frittening, all with dark and strange lore around them.

Moving through the seasons, from a darker Autumn and Winter to a more optimistic Summer, the often-interconnected stories cover a wide range of genres, including gothic, weird horror, speculative, dark fantasy, and solarpunk. Many of the tales are also inspired by nature, climate, and the environment, with feminist and eco themes throughout.

From Peter Marshall, winner of the 2018 Wolfson Prize, Storm’s Edge is a new history of the Orkney Islands that delves deep into island politics, folk beliefs and community memory on the geographical edge of Britain.

Peter Marshall was born in Orkney. His ancestors were farmers and farm labourers on the northern island of Sanday – where, in 1624, one of them was murdered by a witch. In an expansive and enthralling historical account, Marshall looks afresh at a small group of islands that has been treated as a mere footnote, remote and peripheral, and in doing so invites us to think differently about key events of British history.

With Orkney as our point of departure, Marshall traverses three dramatic centuries of religious, political and economic upheaval: a time when what we think of as modern Scotland, and then modern Britain, was being forged and tested.

Storm’s Edge is a magisterial history, a fascinating cultural study and a mighty attestation to the importance of placing the periphery at the centre. Britain is a nation composed of many different islands, but too often we focus on just one. This book offers a radical alternative, encouraging us to reorient the map and travel with Peter Marshall through landscapes of forgotten history.

An impossible death: Detective Ethan Krol has been called to the scene of a baffling murder: a man and his son, who appear to have been drowned in sea-water. But the nearest ocean is a thousand miles away.

An improbable story: Hollie Rogers doesn’t want to ask too many questions of her new friend, Abi Eniola. Abi claims to be an ordinary woman from Nigeria, but her high-tech gadgets and extraordinary physical abilities suggest she’s not telling the whole truth.

An incredible quest: As Ethan’s investigation begins to point towards Abi, Hollie’s fears mount. For Abi is very much not who she seems. And it won’t be long before Ethan and Hollie find themselves playing a part in a story that spans cultures, continents… and centuries.

An extraordinary speculative thriller about the scars left by the Atlantic slave-trade, by a master of the genre.

From one of our most treasured BBC broadcasters, the fourth instalment in James Naughtie’s brilliant spy series finds Flemyng back in Berlin, and alone as never before.

It is 1989 and although the Wall is still the Iron Curtain, the end game of the Cold War has begun. Confident that one of his own agents can provide priceless intelligence from the other side, Will Flemyng throws himself into the climactic struggle between East and West.

But fate takes a hand. A sworn enemy in the East has evidence from the Nazi era that could destroy Flemyng and his family, and he lays his trap.

The eyes of the world are on Berlin, but Flemyng faces a personal struggle for honour, and survival, in the city where he learned his trade.

A Granite Silence is an exploration – a journey through time to a particular house, in a particular street, Urquhart Road, Aberdeen in 1934, where eight-year-old Helen Priestly lives with her mother and father.

Among this long, grey corridor of four-storey tenements, a daunting expanse of granite, working families are squashed together like pickled herrings in their narrow flats. Here are Helen’s neighbours: the Topps, the Josses, the Mitchells, the Gordons, the Donalds, the Coulls and the Hunts.

Returning home from school for her midday meal, Helen is sent by her mother Agnes to buy a loaf from the bakery at the end of the street. Agnes never sees her daughter alive again.

Nina Allan explores the aftermath of Helen’s disappearance, turning a probing eye to the close-knit neighbourhood – where everyone knows everyone, at least by sight – and with subtlety and sympathy, explores the intricate layers of truth and falsehood that can coexist in one moment of history.

Full of echoes, allusions and eerie diversions, A Granite Silence is an investigation into a notorious true crime case, but also a stylish, imaginative inquiry into who gets to tell a story, how it is told, and why.

It is 1901, and Dr Gallagher has just pronounced Murray Hall dead. New York politico, gambler, womaniser – Hall is all these things, but when the press break the news of his death to the world, they reveal a side to his identity he never wanted known, a secret no one could have guessed.

One journalist is determined to uncover the truth of Hall’s past, but his search leads him down winding alleys of fact and fiction. From humble beginnings in Glasgow’s tenements to a life spent rubbing up against New York’s political elite, Murray Hall is the definition of a self-made man. But the higher his status rises, the higher the stakes become.

Inspired by a true story of one Scot’s rise to prominence, Murray Hall unearths a queer past erased by history, finally bringing all the puzzle pieces together to discover the secret of this extraordinary, ordinary man, which shocked New York, America and the world.

THE SHOW MUST GO ON …

1910. With the disappearance of her mother and the sudden death of her father, Lena instantly loses any security she has within the circus she has known all her life. She is advised to sell the carousel her father cared for like a child and look for a husband, or a job in a factory.

Until flame-haired Violet, known to all in the fairgrounds as ‘the greatest trapeze artist that ever lived’, suggests they go it alone with their own, all-female act. With her outspoken ways and her refusal to marry, Violet is as much an outcast as Lena. What do they have to lose? Recruiting new performers including bareback horse-rider Rosie, on the run from her abusive father, and Carmen whose rainbow ribbons hide the darkness in her past, the four women form an unbreakable bond.

Thrust into a harsh and dangerous world that treats them with suspicion, disdain and even violence, they must forge their own path in search of freedom, security, and love.

Deeply rooted in the Edwardian era, The Show Woman is brilliantly realised and expertly interlaces strong female characters, deeply-woven family secrets and heartfelt love stories.

How do you build a family without a blueprint to work from?

Kerry Hudson grew up in poverty. Always on the move, shuttled between the care system and her chaotic mother, she left school at 15 without qualifications. Now a prize-winning writer, she looks back and asks: how do you create a different life for yourself and your family?

In Newborn we see how Kerry found love, what it took to decide to start a family of her own and how fragile every step of the journey towards parenthood was. All along the way, she faces obstacles that would test the strongest foundations, from struggles with fertility to being locked down in a Prague maternity hospital to a marriage in crisis. But over and over again, her love, hope, fight – and determination to break patterns and give her son a different life – win through and light her path.

In August 1956 a young shepherd, his wife, two-year-old daughter and ten-day-old son sat huddled in a small boat on Loch Monar in Ross-shire as a storm raged around them. They were bound for a tiny, remote cottage at the western end of the loch which was to be their home for the next four years.

Isolation Shepherd is the moving story of those years. Set against the awesome splendour of some of Scotland’s most spectacular scenery, Iain R. Thomson’s classic book provides a sensitive, richly detailed account of the shepherd’s life through the seasons and recreates the events that shaped the family’s life in Glen Strathfarrar before the area was flooded as part of a huge hydro-electric project.

In the early 18th century, Edinburgh was a filthy backwater town synonymous with poverty and disease. Yet by century’s end, it had become the marvel of modern Europe, home to the finest minds of the day and their breathtaking innovations in architecture, politics, science, the arts, and economies – all of which continues to echo loudly today. Adam Smith penned “The Wealth of Nations”. James Boswell produced “The Life of Samuel Johnson”. Alongside them, pioneers such as David Hume, Robert Burns, James Hutton, and Sir Walter Scott transformed the way we understand our perceptions and feelings, sickness and health, relations between the sexes, the natural world, and the purpose of existence.

James Buchan beautifully reconstructs the intimate geographic scale and boundless intellectual milieu of Enlightenment Edinburgh. With the scholarship of an historian and the elegance of a novelist, he tells the story of the triumph of this unlikely town and the men whose vision brought it into being.

Trains and stagecoaches stuck in the snow, wild storms driving sailing ships off course, traffic pile-ups on so-called ‘killer’ highways – stories abound about the horrors of travel in the Highlands and Islands, and have done for as far as the records go back.

James Miller tells the dramatic and sometimes surprisingly humorous story of travel and transport in the Highlands. Some of the figures in the story are familiar – General George Wade, Thomas Telford and Joseph Mitchell among them – but there are a host of others too, including the intrepid Lady Sarah Murray, who offered sound advice for travellers (‘Provide yourself with a strong roomy carriage, and have the springs well corded’).

This thought-provoking book will appeal to all who like stories of travel and transport, and are interested in how changing modes of transport have affected the ways of life in the Highlands and remain crucial to the modern life and the future of the region.

The Scots Kitchen, first published in 1929, gives a delightful account of eating and drinking in Scotland throughout the ages, with definitive recipes for all the traditional national dishes.

Cookery writer and broadcaster Catherine Brown describes the impact this pioneering book has had on the whole of Scottish cuisine and traces the fascinating life story of Marian McNeill herself. Notes explain how to use the book so that its treasure trove of recipes, covering the whole gamut of Scottish cuisine, can be explored in the modern kitchen.

The contents includes:

Soups * Brose and Kail * Fish * Game and Pultry * Meat * Vegetables * Sauces * Snacks and Savouries * Puddings and Pies * Sweets * Bannocks, Scones and Tea-breads * Cakes and Shortbreads * Preserves * Sweeties * Beverages

The chronicle begins millions of years ago, with the dramatic geological events that formed the awe-inspiring yet beloved landscapes, followed by the arrival of hunter gatherers and the monumental achievements of prehistoric peoples in places like Skara Brae in Orkney. The story continues with the mysterious Picts; the arrival of the Romans as they expanded the boundaries of their huge empire; the coming of Christianity and the Gaelic language from Ireland; the Viking invasion and the establishment of the great Lordship of the Isles that lasted for three hundred years.

The Highlands are perhaps best known as the key battleground in Bonnie Prince Charlie’s doomed attempt to restore the Stuart monarchy and its dreadful aftermath, which saw the suppression of the clans and the whole of Highland culture. This situation was exacerbated by the terrible Clearances of the nineteenth century which saw tens of thousands evicted from their native lands and forced to emigrate. But, after centuries of decline, the Highlands are being renewed, the land is coming alive once more, and the story ends on an upbeat note as the Highlands look forward to a future full of possibilities.

While this is an epic history of a fascinating subject, Moffat also features the stories of individuals, the telling moments and the crucial details which enrich the human story and add context and colour to the saga of Scotland.

It is Mother’s Day tomorrow and the shops are sparkling with lights and gifts, with people, laughter and excitement – looking for the perfect gift to bring a smile of joy to mums at home. Among the candles and balloons, the orchids and chocolate hearts, one young girl searches for a card that features a mum who looks like hers. Her mum has gold bangles that jingle-jangle when she washes the curry pots. Her mum wears silk kameez when she buys papaya at the market. Her mum has dark eyes that flash when she dances the bhangra. What will the little girl do if she can’t find a card with a mum who looks like hers? A lively, inclusive picture book about identity and belonging that joyfully celebrates mums and motherhood.

A swoon-worthy Scottish romance set on the picturesque Isle of Skye. From the author of Kilt Trip.

Scot on the Trail!

Brooke Sinclair’s dream of being a published author derailed when she was expelled from the University of Edinburgh seven years ago. Now a ghostwriter, she sticks to other people’s stories. But when her college mentor Mhairi McCallister needs a co-writer for her memoir about Scotland’s most challenging trek, Brooke would do anything for the opportunity – including agreeing to hike the rugged Skye Trail for authenticity’s sake. What she doesn’t know is that the nature photographer who’ll join her is Jack Sutherland, the man who shattered Brooke’s writing career – and her heart.

Between getting sacked from the university and walking away from his family’s tour-guiding business to follow his photography dreams, Jack is desperate to prove he didn’t disappoint his family for nothing. Even if it means acting as guide and storyteller for the one who got away.

As Jack and Brooke head into the solitude of the sweeping Scottish landscape, they’re forced to confront old feelings. But can two weeks and eighty miles heal years of unspoken hurt and offer a second chance at love?

A sharp, empowering novel about a group of women who refuse to go quietly when society tells them they’re no longer valuable beyond the age of 40, from the author of Ginger and Me.

Amy, Carole, Lenore and Susan have been best friends since school. Back then they couldn’t wait for the future, for the amazing lives they’d have.

But things haven’t worked out how they expected. Now in their forties, they’re fed up with being taken for granted by their families, being passed over for promotions at work and being told that they’re past their best. And they’re not going to go quietly anymore.

Fuelled by female rage and their charismatic leader Amy, the four embark on a campaign of graffiti in their hometown of Hamilton, scrawling feminist slogans on the walls of local buildings.

But is Hamilton ready for the feminist revolution the Graffiti Girls have in store?

One family home. Three generations. What could possibly go wrong?

Carly loves her family. She really does. It’s just that now her three children are grown up, she thought it was her time.

Everyone talks about the empty nest and how difficult that can be, but Carly and her husband, Frank, have often fantasised about it – meals without arguments, conversation without shouting over the sound of the Xbox, holidays planned around the culture not the kids’ club.

But Carly’s nest is far from empty. Her elderly dad needs more support and is moving in ‘temporarily’. On top of which, Carly’s son, Eddie, is far too comfortable at home – why go out and get a job, when your parents keep you fed and your clothes laundered? And just when Carly is starting to pull her hair out, Eddie drops a bombshell that changes everything.

Is there room in the nest for one more?

As a world heritage site and one of the most visited cities in the world, Edinburgh boasts a huge range of buildings from all periods and in many different styles. In this book, architectural writer Robin Ward introduces 300 of the city’s most fascinating places, from imposing public buildings such as galleries, museums, banking halls, churches and theatres to pubs, domestic dwellings, monuments and industrial architecture.

Conveniently grouped by location, all areas of the city are covered, including suburbs. All are accessible by walking, cycling, public transport or car.

This lavish book features objects dating from the 12th through to the 17th centuries It provides a definition for what stained glass is, how it is made, the various techniques used in the creation of the glass, and the intricate decoration and artwork of key individual pieces, using examples from the range of glass collected by Sir William. Stained glass was a passion of his; he incorporated it into his home at Hutton Castle in the Scottish Borders, and was keen for it to be shown to its best advantage in its eventual location in the Burrell Collection.