THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

Walk Like A Girl is based on a true story. My true story. I travelled for almost a year in the Caucasus Mountains, Nepal, India and Europe. During this journey, I faced a rampant water buffalo, a freezing glacier crossing and spent a blissful night unaware that I was camping in a minefield – all of this whilst also experiencing the most painful heartbreak of my young life. When I flew back to Europe, I walked the Camino Frances. Upon reaching Santiago de Compostela, I realised I wanted to continue and flew to Portugal, where I walked the Camino Portugues.

In eight months, I walked approximately 1,800 kilometres.

I later recognised I was in denial about my fears for my future and my deteriorating relationship.

Uncle Pete’s plane is missing, AGAIN! It’s been shot down by evil wildlife hunters and has sunk deep into the cold Arctic sea. That means Uncle Pete and TM will have to go and find it, fix it and bring it home. But how? By Squirrel Submarine, of course!

But wait! The crew of the Squirrel Submarine are having a well-earned rest at the NutLand Holiday Park after their last adventure, which means Uncle Pete and TM will have to drive the submarine themselves. How hard can it be? Pretty hard, as it turns out! Uncle Pete and TM get themselves into all kinds of crazy underwater adventures and dilemmas as they search the deep for their plane.

MEANWHILE, the lost plane has been discovered at the bottom of the ocean by a clever and curious octopus who decides to fix it and use it to explore his world, helping other sea creatures along the way.

When whispers of abuse at Arrol’s department store reach Mabel, a determined policewoman, she knows she must act. Enlisting the help of Johnnie, a cunning thief, and Beatrice, a savvy businesswoman, they embark on a perilous journey to uncover the truth.

Set against the backdrop of 1920s Glasgow, where women’s voices are often silenced, this thrilling tale weaves together crime, justice, and the fight for equality. As the trio inches closer to exposing the scandal, they realize that in a world where women are rarely believed, their very lives may be at stake.

‘This is a work of fiction. This is not a confession.’

Lucas Cole is a bestselling writer. He is also a father, a widower, and a beloved celebrity in his small town. He is an unassuming man ­- tall, thin and quietly friendly. Lucas Cole is also a serial killer.

Nathan Cole has known the truth about his father since he was ten years old. Too terrified to go to the police, he ran away from home as soon as he was able, carrying the guilt of leaving his sister behind. But when Lucas is found dead in a dingy motel room, Nathan returns to his childhood home for the first time in seventeen years. It’s there he finds The Midnight King, his father’s final unpublished manuscript, a fictionalised account of his hideous crimes, hidden in a box of trinkets taken from his victims. Trinkets that include a ribbon belonging to a missing eight-year-old girl who disappeared only days before his father’s death.

Now, Nathan must deal with the consequences of keeping his father’s secret. But it may not be as simple as finding a lost child. For The Midnight King holds Nathan’s secrets as well as Lucas’s, and he is not the only one searching for the truth…

As a woman, if you lived in Scotland in the 1500s, there was a very good chance that you, or someone you knew, would be tried as a witch. Witch hunts ripped through the country for over 150 years, with at least 4,000 accused, and with many women’s fates sealed by a grizzly execution of strangulation, followed by burning.

Inspired to correct this historic injustice, campaigners and writers Claire Mitchell, KC, and Zoe Venditozzi, have delved deeply into just why the trials exploded in Scotland to such a degree. In order to understand why it happened, they have broken down the entire horrifying process, step-by-step, from identification of individuals, to their accusation, ‘pricking’, torture, confessions, execution and beyond.

With characteristically sharp wit and a sense of outrage, they attempt to inhabit the minds of the persecutors, often men, revealing the inner workings of exactly why the Patriarchy went to such extraordinary lengths to silence women, and how this legally sanctioned victimisation proliferated in Scotland and around the world.

With testimony from a small army of experts, pen portraits of the women accused, trial transcripts, witness accounts and the documents that set the legal grounds for the hunts, How to Kill A Witch builds to form a rich patchwork of tragic stories, helping us comprehend the underlying reasons for this terrible injustice, and raises the serious question – could it ever happen again?

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.