THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

Tamar held up one hand, as though hailing a bus. Her purple cardigan billowed around her. She pinched her finger and thumb together, and the wind stopped…

What if you could befriend a cloud? What weather would you choose? What would happen if the weather matched itself to your mood, whether you wanted it to, or not?

11-year-old Stella has returned home to Shetland to spend the summer with Grandpa, but it’s nothing like she remembers. Grandpa is lost in his grief for Gran, the island is bleak and Stella feels lonely and trapped. That is until she encounters an old woman, Tamar, who, to Stella’s amazement, can spin rainbows and call hurricanes.

Soon Stella discovers that she too is a Weather Weaver. With the help of Nimbus, a feisty young storm cloud, Stella begins to learn the craft of weather weaving. But when Nimbus brain-fogs Grandpa and The Haken, a local sea witch, starts to close in on the island, she realises that with magic comes big responsibilities.

It will take all her heart and courage to face the coming storm…

Drawing on the elements, island myths and the natural world, The Weather Weaver by debut author Tamsin Mori is a magical tale  so rooted in the everyday that young readers will think it entirely possible that they too can conjure up a rainbow outside their window, or catch a cloud of their very own.

A candid examination of the life of North Sea oil riggers, and an explosive portrayal of masculinity, loneliness and female desire.

In her mid-30s and sprung out of a terrible relationship, Tabitha quit her job at a women’s magazine, left London and put her savings into a six-month lease on a flat in a dodgy neighbourhood in Aberdeen – she was going to make good on a long-deferred idea for a book about oil rigs and the men who work on them. Why oil rigs? “I wanted to see what men were like, with no women around.”

Sea State is, on the one hand, a portrait of an overlooked industry, and a fascinating subculture in its own right: ‘offshore’ is a way of life for generations of British workers, primarily working class men. Offshore is also a potent metaphor for a lot of things we might rather keep at bay – class, masculinity, the North-South divide, the transactional nature of desire, the terrible slipperiness of the ladder that could lead us towards (or away from) real security, just out of reach.‎

And Sea State is, too, the story of a journalist whose distance from her subject becomes perilously thin. In Aberdeen, when she’s not researching the book, Tabitha takes pills and dances with a forgotten kind of abandon – reliving her Merseyside youth, when the music was good and the boys were bad. Twenty years on, there is Caden: a married rig worker who spends three weeks on and three weeks off. Alone and increasingly precarious, she dives in deep. The relationship, reckless and explosive, lays them both bare.‎

The breathtaking adventure continues in the sequel to the much-loved Orphans of the Tide.

Orphans Ellie and Seth have crossed an endless ocean in search of freedom and peace.

Arriving on the shores of a colourful tropical island ruled by a mysterious queen, it seems they might just have found the perfect new home.

But there is trouble brewing in paradise and soon Ellie and Seth find themselves caught up in a dangerous struggle for power – and forced to confront terrible truths from their past . . .

The must-have new Victorian novel from bestselling, much-loved children’s author, Jacqueline Wilson.

Victorian London, 1851. Queen Victoria is on the throne and the Great Exhibition is about to open!

Lucy Locket lives with her father, the New Mother and the New Baby. They sent away her beloved Nurse and replaced her with a horrid governess. Lucy desperately wants someone to be kind to her, and to have some fun – there’s very little of that in her house.

Kitty Fisher is a street performer who earns tin for her supper by tumbling. She has always lived on the street and on her wits, with only the kind Gaffer to help her. But now Gaffer is gone, and Kitty is all alone.

When Lucy runs away from home, Kitty shows Lucy how to survive – where to find the best picnic leftovers in the park, and which trees makes the best beds. Lucy learns quickly and shows Kitty her own skills – befriending families to get free meals and singing beautiful melodies for the crowds.

But the streets of Victorian London are dangerous and soon the girls find themselves under threat from thieves – and even worse, the Workhouse!

The first interdisciplinary exploration of eighteenth-century Glasgow

• Approaches Glasgow’s history as a guide to the cultural memory of the city read through traditional historical and literary analysis
• Engages with primary sources such as contemporary literature, journalism, and ephemera from a range of institutions and archives
• Sets out a methodological blueprint for new research into other cities or civic spaces

This book provides a long overdue reading of Scotland’s largest city as it was during the long eighteenth century. These formative years of Enlightenment, caught between the tumultuous ages of the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution, cast Glasgow in a new and vibrant light. Far from being a dusty metropolis lying in wait for the famous age of shipbuilding, Glasgow was already an imperial hub: as implicated in mass migration and slavery as it was in civic growth and social progression. Craig Lamont incorporates case studies such as the Scottish Enlightenment, the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Eighteenth Century Print Culture to investigate how the city was shaped by the emergence of new trades and new ventures in philosophy, fine art, science, and religion. The book merges historical, literary and memory studies to provide an original blueprint for new research into other cities or civic spaces.

The second book from the author of A Kind Of Spark, with Neurodivergent characters you’ll root for and a moving friendship at its heart.

When Cora’s brother drags her along to his boss’s house, she doesn’t expect to strike up a friendship with Adrien, son of the intimidating CEO of Pomegranate Technologies. As she becomes part of Adrien’s life, she is also drawn into the mysterious projects at Pomegranate.

At first, she’s intrigued by them – Pomegranate is using AI to recreate real people in hologram form. As she digs deeper, however, she uncovers darker secrets…

Cora knows she must unravel their plans, but can she fight to make her voice heard, whilst never losing sight of herself?

Jen Hadfield’s new collection is an astonished beholding of the wild landscape of her Shetland home, a tale of hard-won speech, and the balm of the silence it rides upon. The Stone Age builds steadily to a powerful and visionary panpsychism: in Hadfield’s telling, everything – gate and wall, flower and rain, shore and sea, the standing stones whose presences charge the land – has a living consciousness, one which can be engaged with as a personal encounter.

The Stone Age is a timely reminder that our neurodiversity is a gift: we do not all see the world the world in the same way, and Hadfield’s lyric line and unashamedly high-stakes wordplay provide nothing less than a portal into a different kind of being. The Stone Age is the work of a singular artist at the height of her powers – one which dramatically extends and enriches the range of our shared experience.

Beneath the wide skies of Orkney Linda Gask recalls her career as a consultant psychiatrist and her lifelong struggle with her own mental health. After the favelas of Brazil, the glittering cities of the Middle East, and the forests of Haida Gwaii, will she find perspective, spiritual relief, and healing in her new home?

A poisoned breeze blows across the waves … Operation Cauldron, 1952: Top-secret germ warfare experiments on monkeys and guinea pigs are taking place aboard a vessel moored off the Isle of Lewis. Local villagers Jessie and Duncan encounter strange sights on the deserted beach nearby and suspect the worst. And one government scientist wrestles with his own inner anguish over the testing, even if he believes extreme deterrent weapons are needed. When a noxious cloud of plague bacteria is released into the path of a passing trawler, disaster threatens. Will a deadly pandemic be inevitable?

A haunting exploration of the costs and fallout of warmongering, Donald S Murray follows his prize-winning first novel with an equally moving exploration of another little-known incident in the Outer Hebridean island where he grew up.

A thoroughly postmodern monster finds kinship in mutability and endurance. A restaurant critic meets his match in a tale of telepathic tongues. A put-upon middle-manager dreams of bloody revenge against the puerile Big Babies. A courier chases an impossible connection across a city that doesn’t exist. Seeking solace in queer lives and landscapes, these fables of loneliness, love and liminality delight in disgust, discover joy in daily junk, and create wild unexpected treasures from the most unusual of leftovers.

“Vance’s fantasy elements are all the more enchanting for being so close to reality. The mix of magic and the everyday will linger with readers long after the book is shut.” – Publishers Weekly

“These stories are unsettling in the best way: they get under your skin and take root.” – Rachel Plummer, author of Wain

“A freakish, festering, and occasionally beautiful collection of stories.” – Laura Waddell, author of Exit

“So very queer and fantastical, the stories of One Man’s Trash (nothing rubbish here!) push the reader one step closer to the weird.” – Matthew Bright, author of ​Stories to Sing in the Dark​

Glasgow, 1932. When the son-in-law of one of the city’s wealthiest shipbuilders is found floating in the River Clyde with his throat cut, it falls to Inspector Jimmy Dreghorn to lead the murder case – despite sharing a troubled history with the victim’s widow, Isla Lockhart.

From the flying fists and flashing blades of Glasgow’s gangland underworld, to the backstabbing upper echelons of government and big business, Dreghorn and his partner ‘Bonnie’ Archie McDaid will have to dig deep into Glasgow society to find out who wanted the man dead and why.

All the while, a sadistic murderer stalks the post-war city leaving a trail of dead bodies in their wake. As the case deepens, will Dreghorn find the killer – or lose his own life in the process?

Edge of the Grave by Robbie Morrison is a dark historical crime novel set in Glasgow, 1932. A city still recovering from the Great War; split by religious division and swarming with razor gangs. For fans of William McIlvanney’s Laidlaw, Denise Mina and Philip Kerr.

Kitchenly 434 is set in a sprawling Tudorbethan mansion in Sussex, Kitchenly Mill Race, on the cusp of the arrival of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister. In some ways, the last days of an Age of Innocence.

Marko Morrell, guitarist in Fear Taker, is one of the biggest rock stars in the world. His demanding lifestyle means he is frequently in absentia at Kitchenly, his idyllic country retreat, and so it is his butler (or ‘help’), Crofton Park, who is charged with the maintenance and housekeeping. When, one day, two young girls arrive looking for Marko clutching their copies of Fear Taker LPs, Crofton finds himself on a romantic misadventure which leads to the tragi-comic unravelling of the fantasies he has been living by.

A novel about delusional male behaviour, opening and closing curtains, self-awareness, loneliness and ‘getting it together in the country’, Kitchenly 434 is a magnificent novel about the Golden Age of Rock in the bucolic English countryside.

Rutherglen resident Derek J Brown is a well-known face on the Glasgow spoken word scene with his quixotic take on life, the world, and the city of Glasgow.

This is the first substantial collection of his work. A Strategy of Mirrors contains 125 pages of his poems including the favourites: ‘The Fractals of Cathkin Braes’, ‘The Day Gene Vincent Came to Glasgow’ and ‘The Seagulls of Sauchiehall Street’.

Spike Munro is a poet well known for his performances on the Edinburgh, Lothian and Fife spoken world circuit. Along with Joss Cameron he formed Balladonia, offering an original combination of poetry and song in performance.

HAMISH HENDERSON (1919-2002), poet, folklorist, song writer and activist, struggled to get his work recognised during his lifetime, but in recent years, following the publication of a massive two-volume biography and a new edition of his collected poems and songs, he has achieved something of a cult status in Scottish cultural life. His birthday is the occasion of an annual festival and the hundredth anniversary of his birth in 2019 was marked by a plethora of events and tributes.

Ian Spring knew and worked with Hamish Henderson from the 1970s onwards. In this new introduction to his work he attempts to summarise his achievement and place Henderson’s work and ideas in a contemporary context.

The Black Cuillin, the most rugged mountain range in the UK, forms a continuous chain of narrow ridges, jagged gabbro pinnacles and wild, ice-scoured corries around the basin of Loch Coruisk. The magnetic attraction of the Cuillin has drawn visitors like Boswell and Johnson, Sir Walter Scott, J M W Turner, geologist James David Forbes and Skyeman, Alexander Nicolson who made the first ascent of the highest peak, Sgurr Alasdair. By the late nineteenth century the Sligachan Inn had become a Mecca for members of the Alpine Club and Scottish Mountaineering Club. Norman Collie and local guide, John Mackenzie, were the first to systematically explore the range: ‘Nowhere in the British Isles are there rock climbs to be compared with those in Skye, measure them by what standards you will, length, variety or difficulty.’ This new and exhaustive history of climbing in these hills covers the discoveries and exploits of the pioneers for whom even an ascent of a single peak was a formidable prospect to the athletic rock climbers of more recent generations who flock to these beautiful and challenging mountains.

Mary Symon’s Scots poems, notably those dealing with the First World War, are relatively well-known and often anthologised, yet have been unavailable in print for some time. The only volume of her work, Deveron Days, published during her lifetime (and re-issued shortly after her death) is almost impossible to find for sale, and few copies exist even in libraries. This new edition of her collected poems with an introduction to her work is, therefore, timely.

Mary Symon was born in Dufftown, Banffshire in 1863 and seldom strayed far from home although her work, championed by Hugh MacDiarmid and others, has a universal appeal. Many of her poems deal humorously with small town life, but it was the stimulus of the First World War, during which her homeland, the Cabrach, and her local regiment, the Gordon Highlanders, endured a massive loss of young lives, that sparked her finest work which can readily be compared with other, better known, North-East poets such and Marion Angus and Violet Jacob.

In 1889, the year Jack the Ripper committed his last murder, another sensational story hit the press. This is the story of a famous murder on a Scottish mountain and its aftermath. A chilling tale of crime and retribution.

This is the true story of an infamous murder in the Scottish mountains. Taking place in 1898, the year Jack the Ripper committed the last of his murders, the murder of an English tourist, Edwin Rose, on Goatfell, in the Isle of Arran, was a sensation of the time.

Additional information:

July 1889, and Jack the Ripper has just committed the last of the Whitechapel murders. The Scottish press, however, are more interested in a sensational local case. The body of an English tourist, 32-year-old Edwin Rose, has been found battered and bloody and hidden beneath a boulder on the slopes of Goatfell, a mountain on the Isle of Arran. This is the story of the Goatfell tragedy of 1889 – the only murder, if it was a murder, ever committed on the Scottish mountains- including hitherto unpublished letters from John Watson Laurie, subsequently convicted for the crime, who became the longest serving prisoner in Scotland.

Golden Age detective stories set in Edinburgh. Hamish McDavitt, doyen of the Scotch Malt Whisky Society and habitué of the streets and wynds of the old city solves mysteries with the aid of a ‘wee dram’.

Born in County Monaghan, Freddy Anderson (1928-2002) came to Glasgow after the war and was a well-known figure in the city and amongst the Scottish literary scene. This is the first collected edition of his works including his poems, the novel Oiney Hoy and the award-winning play about John Maclean, Krassivy.