THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

A classic ghost story illustrated by acclaimed cartoonist, Seth.

The Pole-Star’s voyage comes to a halt after becoming trapped in the arctic ice, threatening the lives of its crew. Superstition soon takes hold as the frightened men claim to hear ghosts in the darkness, but it’s the captain’s increasingly strange behaviour that concerns the doctor most.

Alexander McCall Smith’s 44 Scotland Street series is the world’s longest running serial novel. Readers all over the world delight in his amusing characters and descriptions of the city of Edinburgh.

With The 44 Scotland Street Cookbook fans can now immerse themselves in the world of Edinburgh’s New Town and eat like their favourite characters. Anna Marshall has ransacked the pages (and cupboards!) of 44 Scotland Street to find all the best snacks, treats and dinners enjoyed by its inhabitants.

Step into the world of Edinburgh foodies and enjoy Big Lou’s “Off the Record” Bacon Rolls, Bertie’s much-loved Panforte di Sienna or Angus Lordie’s famous cheese scones.

A legend among mountaineers, Doug Scott’s expeditions, undertaken over a period of four decades, are unparalleled achievements. This book describes the extraordinary drama of them all, from the Himalayas to New Zealand, Patagonia, Yosemite and Alaska. It includes his famous ‘epic’ on The Ogre, one of the hardest peaks in the world to climb, his ascent of Kangchenjunga without supplementary oxygen and his ascent, with Doug Haston, of Everest in 1975.

Catherine Moorehead also uncovers the elusive man behind the obsessive mountaineer. From his rumbustious youth in Nottingham through two tempestuous marriages to a secure third marriage, she shows how Scott matured in thought and action as his formidable global reputation increased. In doing so she reveals him to be a clash of opposites, an infuriating monomaniac who took extraordinary risks yet who developed a deep interest in Buddhism and inspired widespread affection.

Scott spent almost as long as his climbing career in founding and developing Community Action Nepal, providing schools and health posts in remote parts of Nepal, where he is still much revered after his death in 2020. The book also tells how this self-help charity was started, how it survived the Civil War and the devasting 2015 earthquake.

Cruising Scotland makes inspiring and informative reading for anyone considering sailing the area. It provides additional information, points of interest and many photographs and is a fascinating and invaluable addition to the Club”s publications. No yacht cruising the Scottish west coast should be without a copy.

It was first written by the late Journal Editor, Mike Balmforth, in conjunction with the Editor of the Sailing Directions, Edward Mason, who has now prepared this third edition with Imray.

“If the CCC Sailing Directions are the main course of Scottish cruising under sail, this Companion is both the tantalising G&T and the reflective single malt digestif

‘A book for both the boat and the armchair.’ Little Ship Club magazine.

Whether you want to explore London, hike the Scottish Highlands, or marvel at Stonehenge, the local Fodor’s travel experts in Great Britain are here to help! Fodor’s Essential Great Britain guidebook is packed with maps, carefully curated recommendations, and everything else you need to simplify your trip-planning process and make the most of your time.

Fodor’s “Essential” guides have been named by Booklist as the Best Travel Guide Series of 2020!

Fodor’s Essential Great Britain travel guide includes:

AN ILLUSTRATED ULTIMATE EXPERIENCES GUIDE to the top things to see and do

MULTIPLE ITINERARIES to effectively organize your days and maximize your time

MORE THAN 80 DETAILED MAPS and a FREE PULL-OUT MAP to help you navigate confidently

COLOR PHOTOS throughout to spark your wanderlust!

HONEST RECOMMENDATIONS FROM LOCALS on the best sights, restaurants, hotels, nightlife, shopping, performing arts, activities, and more

PHOTO-FILLED “BEST OF” FEATURES on “Great Britain’s Best Museums”, “Great Britain’s Best Castles”, and more

TRIP-PLANNING TOOLS AND PRACTICAL TIPS including when to go, getting around, beating the crowds, and saving time and money

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL INSIGHTS providing rich context on the local people, politics, art, architecture, cuisine, geography and more

SPECIAL FEATURES on “Golfing in Scotland”, “What to Watch and Read Before You Visit”, and “What to Eat and Drink”

LOCAL WRITERS to help you find the under-the-radar gems

UP-TO-DATE COVERAGE ON: London, Oxford, Cambridge, Bath, the Cotswolds, Liverpool, Stratford-Upon-Avon, Manchester, Stonehenge, York, Cardiff, Snowdonia National Park, Edinburgh, Glasgow, St. Andrews, Loch Ness, the Highlands, Isle of Skye, and more

Looking for more detailed guides on Great Britain? Check out Fodor’s London, Fodor’s Essential England, and Fodor’s Essential Scotland.*Important note for digital editions: The digital edition of this guide does not contain all the images or text included in the physical edition.

ABOUT FODOR’S AUTHORS: Each Fodor’s Travel Guide is researched and written by local experts. Fodor’s has been offering expert advice for all tastes and budgets for over 80 years. For more travel inspiration, you can sign up for our travel newsletter at fodors.com/newsletter/signup, or follow us @FodorsTravel on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. We invite you to join our friendly community of travel experts at fodors.com/community to ask any other questions and share your experience with us!

How far would you go to save yourself when the truth can’t set you free?

Set in the Scottish Lowlands in 1593, told from the point of view of three women from the same family, Burnt Offerings is the story of Besse Duncan, a young mother whose husband is missing, who is accused of witchcraft by the man who attempts to rape her. Destined to lose her daughter, her freedom and her life, this is the story of one woman’s fight for vindication through a patriarchal landscape of torture and persecution while her life hangs in the balance.

Tales for Twilight offers a spine-tingling selection of unnerving tales by writers from James Hogg in the early eighteenth century to James Robertson, very much alive in the twenty-first. Scottish authors have proved to be exceptionally good at writing ghost stories.

Perhaps it’s because of the tradition of oral storytelling that has stretched over centuries, including poems and ballads with supernatural themes. The golden age was during the Victorian and Edwardian period, but the ghost story has continued to evolve and remains popular to this day.Includes stories from Sir Walter Scott, George Mackay Brown, Muriel Spark, Margaret Oliphant, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Guy Boothby, Algernon Blackwood, Eileen Bigland, Ronald Duncan, James Robertson and Ian Rankin.

A beautiful hardback edition of the seminal novel that changed the face of British fiction.

Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye’ve produced.

Choose life.

‘The best book ever written by man or woman… Deserves to sell more copies than the Bible’ Rebel Inc

‘Welsh writes with a skill, wit and compassion that amounts to genius’ Sunday Times

VINTAGE QUARTERBOUND CLASSICS: Beautiful editions of great books to last a lifetime

In 1918 Lord Leverhulme bought the island of Lewis with ambitious plans to massively expand its fishing industry and increase its population.

In 1923, when his plans had failed, he offered it free of charge to the islanders in two parts. One part, which included impoverished rural areas, was economically unviable. But the other, based around the busy fishing port and administrative centre of Stornoway, was a different matter. In accepting Leverhulme’s offer, the hardheaded, churchgoing business class of Stornoway took on the responsibility of making the radical slogan “Land for the People” a reality. It was an unlikely coupling, but it worked to perfection.

The 20th century was a tumultuous time for Lewis. Migration and depopulation were exacerbated by two world wars. Such problems could not be addressed in the lottery of private landownership, but in the stable, democratic government of the Stornoway Trust, town and country alike would weather the storms.

Roger Hutchinson tells the story of those storms, and of the people who guided their pioneering estate into the relative security and prosperity of the 21st century. In doing so he paints a vivid portrait of a unique landholding experiment, of Highland land struggle and of the island of Lewis itself.

‘Merryn Glover’s The Hidden Fires is not just brave, it is remarkable’ – Sir John Lister-Kaye

Elemental, fierce and full of wonder, the Cairngorm mountains are the high and rocky heart of Scotland. To know them would take forever, to love them demands a kind of courageous surrender.

In The Hidden Fires, Merryn Glover undertakes that challenge with Nan Shepherd as companion and guiding light. Following in the footsteps and contours of The Living Mountain, she explores the same landscapes and themes as Shepherd’s seminal work. This is a journey separated by time but unified by space and purpose, a conversation between two women across nearly a century that explores how entering the life of a mountain can illuminate our own.

An Australian who grew up in the Himalayas, her early experiences of the Scottish hills and weather left her cold. But gradually acclimatising and with an approach like Shepherd’s, that is more mountain wandering than mountaineering, she discovers the spark that sets the hills and herself on fire. Through Glover’s deepening encounter, the wild majesty and iridescence of the Cairngorms is revealed in this beautiful evocation of landscape, place and identity.

From the co-founder of the SFSA and SFSA resident writer comes a dive into what it is about Scottish football than truly captures us. With contributions from the likes of Henry McLeish, Gordon Duncan, Hugh Carter, Tommy McAllister, Tom Miller, Ben Patterson, Colin Campbell, Alan Thompson – and many, many more – this book takes you from club to club, exploring what it is they love about their local teams and football itself.

From Rangers to Falkirk to Dundee United, there is something for every fan of football here. This labour of love will look through not only the history of each of these teams, but the personal story each person has with them. Profits from Truly the People’s Game: Why We Love Scottish Football will be going to support Fans for Foodbanks and the SFSA’s work with Play Soccer Malawi.Scottish football is always a hot topic for fans and those associated. It will also make an ideal gift for any fan this Christmas. Covering a large variety of clubs, any fan can pick up this book and find something of their interest.

The first scholarly edition of Bogle Corbet

Includes explanatory notes and a glossary of Scots vocabulary

Three maps locate the novel’s key transits and locales

A detailed introduction lays out much of the historical background to the novel’s four key locations (Glasgow; London; Jamaica; Upper Canada)

Includes detailed overview of the novel’s original 1831 reception; its rediscovery in the 1950s-70s, and current scholarly debates about the novel

Includes an appendix excerpting key 1831 reviews and documents from the novel’s belated Canadian revival

Through the life-story of its eloquent but depressive narrator, Bogle Corbet links the industrial revolution in Scotland to the French Revolution, Jamaica’s plantation economy to the settlement of English Canada. A pioneering industrial novel, colonial novel, and world systems novel, Bogle Corbet also offers an early psychological portrait of emigrant experience. Galt’s vivid vignettes show Britain and key British colonies at moments of political unrest and transition, and explore the ambivalences of a world newly governed by industrialism, capitalism, globalisation, and mass displacement. Galt’s novel thus remains a work for our own times, even as it offers important transcontinental insights into a key historical juncture. It has inspired eloquent champions (both nineteenth- and twentieth-century) and continues to spark critical debate.

Acclaimed chef Stuart Ralston is known as one of the most innovative and creative cooks working in the UK today. Stuart’s inspirations come from all around him, and throughout his career he has kept a notebook to jot down ideas for flavour combinations and recipes. He goes back to those ideas again and again, playing with taste and texture to create stunning and intriguing dishes.

Catalogued Ideas and Random Thoughts – A Cookbook traces his evolution as a chef, and brings together the food that inspires him, the finely crafted dishes that he creates in his restaurants and the food he likes to cook at home.

A unique and beautiful cloth-bound hardback edition with elastic closure and stunning photography by Clair Irwin.

Revered across the globe as an author of compelling novels, journalism and essays that came to define the twentieth century, George Orwell was an unmatched political visionary, shining a light on the insidious nature of propaganda. Yet this chronicler of war, social injustices and urban poverty spent his later years living in a rustic and remote farmhouse, miles from the nearest neighbour. His rural escape was on the Hebridean island of Jura – another paradox, given that he harboured a deep-seated prejudice against Scotland for much of his life.

In 1946, Orwell arrived at his isolated home of Barnhill as a grieving widower living in the shadow of war and the nuclear threat. It was there he wrote his masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Beyond the writing desk, he was transformed: his new life was one of natural beauty and tight-knit community – and he grew to love a corner of the world he had once dismissed.

Orwell’s Island casts important new light on a great modern thinker and author. No previous biography has revealed so much about Orwell’s later years or his time on Jura, despite this being where he created Big Brother, the Thought Police and Room 101 – creations still in common currency today.

Scotland, 158 AD, is a divided country. On one side of the Antonine Wall, thirteen-year-old Felix is trying to become a good Roman soldier like his father. On the other, twelve-year old Jinny is vowing revenge on the “metal men” who have invaded her Maetae tribe’s homeland. At the Maetae’s sacred circle of standing stones, her planned attack on Felix goes badly wrong, awakening a legend that threatens to bring fire and destruction down on them all. Can Jinny and Felix overcome their differences and soothe the stones back to sleep before it’s too late?

Volume two of Walking the Munros, this guidebook describes 70 challenging and inspiring routes up Scotland’s iconic 3000ft+ mountains within the Northern Highlands, the Cairngorms and the Isle of Skye. The routes, which range from 7 to 46km (with the option to reduce walking distance on some of the longer routes by cycling the approach), cover 143 Munro summits, offering half and full-day walk and scramble options.

Clear and concise route descriptions are accompanied by 1:100K mapping, together with invaluable practical information on access, parking, accommodation and more. Also included are two handy indexes of the Munros – listed alphabetically and by height – a perfect resource for peak-baggers.

This guide incorporates both popular and lesser-known routes, and celebrates the raw and rugged beauty of these majestic mountains.

Guide to 50 walks and easy scrambles in north-western Scotland, covering Southern Torridon, Northern Torridon, Letterewe and Fisherfield, and the Fannichs. Ascents of 27 Munros, 20 Corbetts and 14 Grahams are included, with highlights including Liathach, Beinn Eighe, Beinn Alligin, An Teallach and Slioch. The walks are suitable for those with good navigation skills who are competent in a mountain environment.All the walks in the guide are graded, with summary statistics provided, and each includes clear route description and mapping. There’s also a route summary table to help with choosing appropriate walks. Background information on local geology, wildlife and history, and planning details on when to go, where to stay and what to take are included to make the most out of any trip to Torridon.The region boasts spectacular and distinctive landscapes and breathtaking views. Steep-sided rocky mountains rise above long winding lochs, both freshwater and sea. From the hills there are vast panoramas out across the sea to the Hebrides and of mountains stretching out to the north, south and east. This is a land for those who love open spaces, vast horizons, and the domination of nature.

Made in Scotland: Studies in Popular Music serves as a comprehensive and thorough introduction to the history, politics, culture and musicology of twentieth and twenty-first century popular music in Scotland. The volume consists of essays by local experts and leading scholars in Scottish music and culture, and covers the major figures, styles, and social contexts of popular music in Scotland. Each essay provides adequate context so readers understand why the figure or genre under discussion is of lasting significance. The book includes a general introduction to Scottish popular music, followed by essays organized into three thematic sections: Histories, Politics and Policies, and Futures and Imaginings.

Examining music as cultural expression in a country that is both a nation and a region within a larger state, this volume uses popular music to analyse Scottishness, independence and diversity and offers new insights into the complexity of cultural identity, the power of historical imagination, and the effects of power structures in music. It is a vital read for scholars and students interested in how popular music interacts with and shapes such issues both within and beyond the borders of Scotland.

Made in Scotland: Studies in Popular Music serves as a comprehensive and thorough introduction to the history, politics, culture and musicology of twentieth and twenty-first century popular music in Scotland. The volume consists of essays by local experts and leading scholars in Scottish music and culture, and covers the major figures, styles, and social contexts of popular music in Scotland. Each essay provides adequate context so readers understand why the figure or genre under discussion is of lasting significance. The book includes a general introduction to Scottish popular music, followed by essays organized into three thematic sections: Histories, Politics and Policies, and Futures and Imaginings.

Examining music as cultural expression in a country that is both a nation and a region within a larger state, this volume uses popular music to analyse Scottishness, independence and diversity and offers new insights into the complexity of cultural identity, the power of historical imagination, and the effects of power structures in music. It is a vital read for scholars and students interested in how popular music interacts with and shapes such issues both within and beyond the borders of Scotland.

DCI Kelso Strang is led to believe that something very odd is going on around the prosperous fishing port of Tarleton on Scotland’s south-east coast. Firstly, a young Detective Inspector is traumatised after witnessing a doctor throwing herself off a cliff, and accusations of extortion have riven the local community.And when the ugly death of a young farmer sets off a murder investigation, Strang finds himself caught in a spider’s web of criminality. He is entirely unprepared when he is struck by the worst tragedy of his career, even though it has also brought him into contact with a young advocate’s assistant called Catriona, daughter of DI Marjory Fleming.