THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

‘This is a heart-breaking story, beautifully told. I hope it finds a million readers’ – Andrew O’Hagan

‘What a brave and powerful story. If you like Shuggie Bain and Damian Barr then Slumboy is for you’ – Lemn Sissay

‘Compulsively readable, it’s Dickensian in its rich cast of Glaswegian characters’ – Patrick Gale

John MacDonald must find his mother.

Born into the slums of Glasgow in the late ’70s, a 4-year-old John’s life is filled with the debris of alcoholism and poverty. Soon after witnessing a drowning, his mother’s addictions take over their lives, leaving him starving in their flat, awaiting her return.

A concerned neighbor reports her, and he is forcibly taken away from his mother and placed into the care system. There, he dreams of being reunited with her. His mind is consumed with images and memories he can’t process or understand, which his eventual adoptive parents silence out of fear as he grows into a young man within a strict Catholic and Romany Gypsy community.

This memoir is about how John found his way to his true identity, Juano Diaz, and how, against all odds, his unstoppable love for his mother sets him free.

When Evie’s father falls desperately ill, she finally returns to the family home on Orkney and the wild landscape she left as a teenager, swearing never to return. Not everyone is happy at her arrival, particularly her estranged sister Liv, their relationship broken after a childhood trauma.

As Evie clears out her father’s neglected house to prepare it for sale, lonely Evie finds herself drawn to a group of cold-water swimmers led by her old friend Freya, who find calmness beneath the waves. Together they help Evie face up to the mistakes in her past, unlocking a treasure of truths that will reverberate through the community, and shake her family to its core.

Inspired by her passion for the Orkney islands and its people, The Island Swimmer is the captivating debut novel about the importance of being true to yourself from broadcaster Lorraine Kelly.

‘I’m not here to change your mind about Dusty Springfield or Shostakovich or Tupac Shakur or synthpop. I’m here to change your mind about your mind.’

There are countless books on music with much analysis given to musicians, bands, eras and/or genres. But rarely does a book delve into what’s going on inside us when we listen.

Michel Faber explores two big questions: how we listen to music and why we listen to music. To answer these he considers biology, age, illness, the notion of ‘cool’, commerce, the dichotomy between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ taste and, through extensive interviews with musicians, unlocks some surprising answers.

From the award-winning author of The Crimson Petal and the White and Under the Skin, this curious and celebratory book reflects Michel Faber’s lifelong obsession with music of all kinds. Listen will change your relationship with the heard world.

Britain’s health service is dying. Gavin Francis shows us why we should fight for it.

Since its birth in 1948, the powers that be have chipped away at the NHS. Now, Britain’s best-loved institution is under greater threat than ever, besieged by a deadly combination of underfunding, understaffing and the predatory private sector.

In the wake of the pandemic, we have come to accept a ‘new normal’ of permanent crisis and years-long waiting lists. But, as Gavin Francis reveals in this short, vital book- it doesn’t have to be this way, and until recently, it wasn’t. Drawing on the history of the NHS as well as his own experience as a GP, he introduces us to the inner workings of an institution that has never been perfect but which transformed the lives and health of millions, for free – and which has never been more important.

For those who believe in the future of the NHS and its founding principles, this is essential reading from the bestselling author of Recovery and Intensive Care.

Lovers of Haiku, Zen and Japan will find this novel truly inspiring!

An extraordinary man at a crucial time and place.

“In Mister Timeless Blyth, writer Alan Spence has created a fascinating (auto) biography, convincingly in R.H. Blyth’s own voice. In it, he has conveyed the haiku scholar’s love of music, eastern and western literature, Zen Buddhism, and sly contradictions. Blyth’s profound understanding of haiku and his self-deprecating humor permeate every page. Throughout this work, Mr. Spence has included an interesting constellation of characters who influenced Blyth on what he considered his own karmic path, giving us an entirely new perspective of his life and personal development. I could not put the book down.” — William Scott Wilson, author of The Life and Zen Haiku Poetry of Santoka Taneda

Imprisoned during World War I as a conscientious objector and interned during World War II as an enemy alien, Reginald Horace Blyth was a poet, a scholar, a musician, a linguist and a student of Zen who ultimately became teacher to an emporer. His pivitol works were published in Japan even during his internment.

Blyth ultimately became the key link and mediator between the Imperial Household and the occupying American forces, whom many credit with saving Japan from chaos after the war. His fingerprints are everywhere today in the study of Zen, Haiku and Japanese culture, and his work has influenced some of the most important writers of the 20th century– including Huxley, Oshi, Aiken, Watts, Salinger, Kerouac, Ginsberg and others. He was, in many ways, a man who changed the world!

Mister Timeless Blyth is his story.

Written in the form of an autobiographical novel filled with Zen and poetry, this book recounts a life of hard work, books and music, of spiritual questing, and of learning to be at peace with one’s self and one’s choices. It celebrates a man who built bridge between East and West for the greater part of his lifetime. Through it, we understand someone who moved with a sense of purpose, warmth and humor and left a mark that was very distinct indeed.

SHORTLISTED FOR SCOTLAND’S NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NON-FICTION

‘I loved this book … incredibly moving’ Reverend Richard Coles

‘A treasure of a book’ Fern Britton

The heart-warming memoir from the much-loved broadcaster

A Pebble in the Throat is the coming of age story of Aasmah Mir’s childhood growing up in 1970s Glasgow. From a vivacious child to a teenage loner, Aasmah candidly shares the highs and lows of growing up between two cultures – trying to fit in at school and retreating to the safe haven of a home inhabited by her precious but distant little brother and Helen, her family’s Glaswegian guardian angel.

Intricately woven into this moving memoir is the story of Aasmah’s mother, as we follow her own life as a young girl in 1950s Pakistan to 1960s Scotland and beyond. Both mother and daughter fight, are defeated and triumph in different battles in this sharp and moving story. A Pebble in the Throat is a remarkable memoir about family, identity and finding yourself where you are.

This new collection is a fascinating journey into the heart of each of us – from the author of The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency and the 44 Scotland Street series.

In I Think of You, the reader travels through literary Edinburgh in summer, heartbreak in a rain-drenched glen in the Highlands, a voyage on the Argo in Ancient Greece, and from Dallas to Helsinki and home again. Throughout this collection, the author explores various themes of love, kindness and friendship, as well as the philosophy of food, the idiosyncrasies of language and the importance of canonical hours. Each poem is a journey of the soul that interrogates what it is to love and to be alive.

Shakespeare and Company, Paris, is one of the world’s most iconic and beautiful bookshops. Located on the banks of the Seine, opposite Notre-Dame, it’s long been a meeting place for anglophone writers and readers.

In that tradition, determined for the bookshop to remain a place of meaningful and transformative conversation, owner Sylvia Whitman and novelist and literary director Adam Biles have hosted several hundred interviews with writers, ranging from prize-winning novelists to visionary non-fiction writers.

The Shakespeare and Company Book of Interviews is a selection of the best of these interviews from the last decade. Packed with warmth, sensitivity and humour, it’s a celebration of the greatest writers of our age and an insight into the lives and thoughts behind some of today’s most talked-about books.

*A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK*

The first book to tell the story of day-to-day life on the nuclear home front – from the host of #1 podcast Atomic Hobo

‘So entertaining’ The Times
‘Cracking’ Sunday Telegraph

The atomic bombs of 1945 changed war forever. The awesome power of the blast and its deadly fallout meant home in Britain fell under the nuclear shadow, and the threat of annihilation coloured every aspect of ordinary life for the next forty years.

Families were encouraged to construct makeshift shelters with cardboard and sandbags. Vicars and pub landlords learnt how to sound hand-wound sirens, offering four minutes to scramble to safety. Thousands volunteered to give nuclear first aid, often consisting of breakfast tea, herbal remedies, and advice on how to die without contaminating others. And while the public had to look after themselves, bunkers were readied for the officials and experts who would ensure life continued after the catastrophe.

Today we may read about the Cold War and life in Britain under the shadow of the mushroom cloud with a sense of amusement and relief that the apocalypse did not happen. But it is also a timely and powerful reminder that, so long as nuclear weapons exist, the nuclear threat will always be with us.

A few years ago, Annie Worsley traded a busy life in academia to take on a small-holding or croft on the west coast of Scotland. It is a land ruled by great elemental forces – light, wind and water – that hold sway over how land forms, where the sea sits and what grows. Windswept explores what it means to live in this rugged, awe-inspiring place of unquenchable spirit and wild weather.

Walk with Annie as she lays quartz stones in the river to reflect the moonlight and attract salmon, as she watches otters play tag across the beach, as she is awoken by the feral bellowing of stags. Travel back in time to the epic story of how Scotland’s valleys were carved by glaciers, rivers scythed paths through mountains, how the earliest people found a way of life in the Highlands – and how she then found a home there millennia later.

With stunning imagery and lyrical prose, Windswept evokes a place where nature reigns supreme and humans must learn to adapt. It is her paean to a beloved place, one richer with colour, sound and life than perhaps anywhere else in the UK.

This extraordinary collection celebrates the dazzling worldbuilding of Iain M. Banks, one of the most important and influential writers in modern science fiction.

Faithfully reproduced from notebooks he kept in the 1970s and 80s, these annotated original illustrations depict the ships, habitats, geography, weapons and language of Banks’ Culture series of novels in incredible detail.

Praise for the Culture series:

‘Epic in scope, ambitious in its ideas and absorbing in its execution’ Independent on Sunday

‘Few of us have been exposed to a talent so manifest and of such extraordinary breadth’ New York Review of Science Fiction

‘Jam-packed with extraordinary invention’ Scotsman

‘Banks has created one of the most enduring and endearing visions of the future’ Guardian

‘The good news for those who loved THE ACCIDENTAL FOOTBALLER: this new book is even better. There were times as I read Pat Nevin’s account of his years running – or, trying to run – Motherwell, I had to remind myself to breathe. It’s a thrilling read – funny, nerve-wracking, precise and very, very human’ – Roddy Doyle

So, you fell into football by accident. You’ve played for Chelsea, Everton and your country at an international level. But what happens when you discover you’re in so deep that football has taken over your whole life?

In his brilliant new memoir, Pat Nevin takes us on a journey to the less glamorous side of football. From Tranmere to Kilmarnock, he plays some of the best football he’s ever played. Then, in an unprecedented twist of fate, finds himself both player and Chief Executive of Scottish First Division club Motherwell.

What follows is an entertaining and revealing tale of the side of football that you rarely see as Pat tries to keep the lid on simmering tensions between owner and the manager; travels in Lear jets one moment, but has to sell off half the team, the next. So much is madness, like being the manager’s boss, and his player at the same time; or discovering that the ground’s goalposts are higher on one side than on the other!

And with impossible challenges at every corner, such as learning that their son is autistic, and the club hurtling towards administration, Pat strives to walk the impossible line between player, parent and boss.

FOOTBALL AND HOW TO SURVIVE IT is a real one-off, uncovering the sport in all its complex, confusing and calamitous glory. Once you’ve read it, you may never look at the game in the same way again.

A WATERSTONES BEST BOOK OF 2023: POLITICS

This is a neglected history. Not a sweeping, definitive, exhaustive history of the world but something quieter, more intimate and particular. A single journey, picked out in 101 objects, through the fascinating, too-often-overlooked, manifold histories of women.

Open up this cabinet of curiosities and you’ll find objects that have been highly esteemed – even, like the Bayeux tapestry, fought over by nations – and others that are humble and domestic. Some (like a sixteenth century glass dildo) are objects of female pleasure, some (a thumbscrew) of female subjugation. There are artefacts of women celebrated by history and of women unfairly forgotten by it; examples of female rebellion and of self-revelation; objects that are inspiring, curious or (like radium-laced chocolate) just fundamentally ill-conceived.

Through the variety and nuance in all these 101 objects, Annabelle Hirsch has created a new history – teeming, unexpected, witty and always illuminating. This overdue corrective reveals what a healed femur says about civilisation, what men have to fear from hat pins, and it shows that the past has always been as complicated and fascinating as the women that peopled it.

Now in its eighth decade, can the Edinburgh Festival survive?

Where do we go from here?

1947. The beginning of the Edinburgh Festival and Richard Demarco – later to become gallery director, artist and teacher – is at the heart of it and has been every year since.

The same year, Roddy Martine is born. In 1963, at the age of sixteen, he interviewed Sir Yehudi Menuhin and David Frost for an Edinburgh Festival magazine he edited, and the following year he met Marlene Dietrich.

Both Richard and Roddy have unique perspectives on the most remarkable international festival of the arts the world has ever known. They have witnessed its evolution over the years and are passionate believers in the power of creativity within everyone.

In this fascinating book, Richard – the 2013 uk recipient of the Citizen of Europe medal – explores the original world vision of Sir John Falconer and Rudolph Bing and, with Roddy, recalls the highs and lows of Edinburgh’s Festivals from a unique perspective.

The Edinburgh Festival of those days was a much more accessible village… The ground rules were well enough understood. Everything about it was containable. The Fringe was the seedbed for talent and ran happily in step with its established elders and betters.They both knew their place.

But then something equally remarkable was about to take place in the New Town of the city I knew and loved…

• One hundred remarkable works of art from the National Galleries of Scotland’s collection reveal Scotland’s art history
• Displaying works from the sixteenth century to the present day

The National Galleries of Scotland is home to the most important collection of Scottish art in the world. This beautifully illustrated book introduces the collection through 100 works, specially chosen by the curatorial team who care for them. The selection ranges chronologically from a 16th century portrait of a Scottish king to 21st century installations and prints. Some of the most famous painters in Scotland’s history feature alongside some of the finest artists working in Scotland today. Many of the most distinctive movements in Scotland’s artistic heritage are represented, including the Celtic revival, Arts and Crafts, the Glasgow Boys and the Scottish Colourists.

Each of the 100 works is reproduced alongside a text by one of 23 expert contributors. The introduction gives an overview of the collection and Scottish art history more broadly. It is perfect for those who already love Scottish art, and those who are yet to discover its riches.

It’s OUR bridge.

Scotland’s famous Forth Bridge spans more than a body of water. It connects centuries, communities, land and sea, past and present.

Beyond the famous red struts and lattices lies a varied and lively community, every bit as interconnected and interdependent as the girders of the bridge itself. Just like the six-and-a-half million rivets holding the Forth Bridge together, there are countless points of contact between the people who form the Forth Bridge community in its widest sense, including engineers and environmentalists, managers, model makers, construction workers, campaigners, tour guides and train drivers.

Writer Barbara Henderson and photographer Alan McCredie lift the curtain on the people who work on the bridge, promote the bridge, protect the bridge, live by it, or play a significant part in its story.

One sentiment unites them all.

In one way or another, they all claim ‘the Bridge’ as their own.

We inhabit everything that comes our way: people, places, nature. Writing itself is our habitat. It is this space that Bashabi Fraser that explores in her new collection Habitat.

These poems challenge our understanding of rules and form when it comes to poetry. Bashabi plays with the duality that her life has instructed her with – through having lived in two different countries, experiencing two different cultures – yet allowing the parallels to still come through. At its core, this collection is about our journeys – where we have been, where we are going, and what we are moving through. It is all about our habitats and our connection to them.

The enchanting festive poem from Carol Ann Duffy, former Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, and adorned with sumptuous illustrations by artist Margaux Carpentier, Christmas Eve at The Moon Under Water is the perfect festive gift for the poetry lover in your life.

All the lights were on at The Moon Under Water
and the landlord, an Owl, was slowly pulling a pint
to test his ale. Toothsome. It was Christmas Eve
and the fire in the ancient grate gargled its flames…

A horse walks into a bar. A hedgehog plays the piano. An owl mulls a flagon of wine. On Christmas Eve at The Moon Under Water, anything is possible, so when the landlord announces a festive prize for the best performance of the night, all and sundry pile into the pub, eager for a chance at victory.

In Christmas Eve at The Moon Under Water all the old rivalries of the natural world are suspended for one miraculous night, as man stands shoulder to shoulder with animal, and predator and prey add warble and wail to the Yuletide chorus.

She thought his death was the worst thing that could happen . . . then he came back

Nancy and Calder are moving from London to an isolated slate island, off the west coast of Scotland. Nancy is focussed on their new beginning, but is increasingly unsettled by the stark island, the mysterious inhabitants and Calder’s dark past, which he’s kept hidden from her.

Then one of Nancy’s nightmares plays out in real life: she finds Calder’s boat upturned in the bay, his body adrift in the icy water. He’s clinically dead with no heartbeat. But miraculously the doctors manage to bring him back to life. Everyone think he has made a full recovery, but Nancy doesn’t recognise the man who has come back from the dead. She is now living with a stranger. As secrets, lies and bodies begin to wash up on the island, Nancy must come to terms with the fact that despite the fresh start, sometimes the slate cannot be wiped clean.

“I can see the disgust on the face of one neighbor when Jack, the farmer, asked to lend a man, produced a land girl.”

Mona Macleod worked in Kirkubrightshire during the second World War, providing the skilled labour needed on farms before mechanization. The girls were given heavy agricultural work in fields, with animals, carrying hundred weight sacks, sawing wood, felling trees, filling up rat holes. It was a tough way to grow up, but this illustrated memoir provides a record of a time when women faced the rigorous physical challenges involved in winning the war at home.