THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

A battle lost. A daring escape. A long walk into obscurity. The ultimate failure….In the aftermath of the disastrous Battle of Culloden, a lonely figure takes flight with a small band of companions through the islands and mountains of the Hebrides. His name is Charles Edward Stuart: better known today as Bonnie Prince Charlie. He had come to the country to take the throne. Now he is leaving in exile and abject defeat. In prose that is by turns poetic, comic, macabre, haunting and humane, multi- award-winning author Alan Warner traces the frantic last journey through Scotland of a man who history will come to define for his failure.

Fear and Loathing meets South Park in a screwball horror novella. Part romance, part buddy comedy, part body horror, I Saw Satan At The 7-Eleven is a dark-as-night tale from a phenomenal new name in literary fiction.Two miles north of Hell, a nameless deadbeat narrator spots Satan buying soy milk at the 7-Eleven. Satan’s a washed-up has-been, who’s totally lost his edge. That is until he falls in love with our narrator, and the two embark on a debauched misadventure, by turns slapstick, violent, whimsical, dreamlike and tender.

Stories, monologues and a few poems all written in the Glaswegian dialect of Scots accompanied by photographs with unusual angles of everyday Glasgow scenes. This volume is supported by a Scots Language Publication Award from the Scottish Book Trust. It will appeal to Scots language enthusiasts and to a wide range of those interested in the city of Glasgow, its people and its language.

GLASGOW 1998: Arthur Coyle is seventy-one, having tragically lost his son and shortly thereafter, his wife, he feels alone in the world; a relic from a bygone age when things were simpler, when people understood the order of things, and respect for those that had come before you was universal. He only wants some of the same whilst running down the clock until his own time inevitably
comes.

His best friend, Tam O’Henry, and his pride and joy—his grandson, Danny—are what keep him going. However, after falling on hard times, and too proud to ask for help, Tam succumbs to the offer of a loan from a local gangster and quickly spirals into a world of intimidation and torment at the hands of the ruthless Harry Mullin and his associates.

Danny Coyle is twenty years old. He lives with his mother, just the two of them, his father having died when he was a child. An intelligent young man, he’s the first of the Coyles to be accepted to university. His time there is short-lived though, and he finds himself on the dole with his loyal, but miscreant friends. Gaining employment, to his initial displeasure, he ultimately finds a father figure in his boss, Joe. The dynamic is complicated with Joe’s revelation that he too knew Danny’s father, and knows the secret behind his death.

A summary of my book:

1. I’m diagnosed with autism 20 years after telling a doctor I had it.

2. My terrible Catholic childhood: I hate my parents etc.

3. My friendship with an elderly man who runs the corner shop and is definitely not trying to groom me. I get groomed.

4. Homelessness.

5. Stripping.

6. More stripping but with more nervous breakdowns.

7. I hate everyone at uni and live with a psycho etc.

8. REDACTED as too spicy.

9. After everyone tells me I don’t look autistic, I try to cure my autism and get addicted to Xanax.

10. REDACTED as too embarrassing.

It feels like I’ve only been asleep for a minute but I can’t risk being late for school today – the Very Important Witches are coming!

Bea Black is determined to become the BEST witch she can be and learn EVERYTHING about magic. So when a school visit from some VERY important guests is announced, Bea is thrilled! It’s her chance to help Little Spellshire School for the Extraordinary Arts and show off what she’s learned so far.

But when the visitors arrive, they are NOT who the students and teachers were expecting. In fact, they’re the opposite! With the witch school at risk of being exposed, it’s up to Bea to use her ordinary special skills to save the day.

The perfect potion of magic and mischief, DIARY OF AN ACCIDENTAL WITCH is THE WORST WITCH meets TOM GATES.

In the valley of the Mesta, one of the oldest inhabited river valleys in Europe, where the surrounding forests and mountains are a nexus for wild plant gatherers, Kapka Kassabova finds a story with vast resonance for us all. Elixir is an unforgettable exploration of the deep connections between people, plants and place.

Over several seasons, Kassabova spends time with the people of this magical region. She meets women and men who work in a long lineage of foragers, healers and mystics. She learns about wild plants and the ancient practice of herbalism, and experiences a symbiotic system where nature and culture have blended for thousands of years. Through her captivating encounters we come to feel the devastating weight of the ecological and cultural disinheritance that the people of this valley have suffered. Yet, in her search for elixir, she also finds reasons for hope. The people of the valley are keepers of a rare knowledge, not only of mountain plants and their properties, but also of how to transform collective suffering into healing.

Immersive and enthralling, at its heart Elixir is a search for a cure to what ails us in the Anthropocene. It is an urgent call to rethink how we live – in relation to one another, to the Earth and to the cosmos.

The food stories behind your favourite fruits and vegetables.

Have you ever wondered who picked your Fairtrade banana? Or why we can buy British strawberries in April? How far do you think your green beans travelled to get to your plate? And where do all the wonky carrots go? Above all, how do we stop worrying about our food choices and start making decisions that make a difference?

In an effort to make sense of the complex food system we are all part of, Louise Gray decides to track the stories of our five-a-day, from farm to fruit bowl, and discover the impact that growing fruits and vegetables has on the planet.

Through visits to farms, interviews with scientists and trying to grow her own, she digs up the dirt behind organic potatoes, greenhouse tomatoes and a glut of courgettes.

In each chapter, Louise answers a question about a familiar item in our shopping basket. Is plant protein as good as meat? Is foraged food more nutritious? Could bees be the answer to using fewer chemicals? How do we save genetic diversity in our apples? Are digital apps the key to reducing food waste? Is gardening good for mental health? And is the symbol of clean eating, the avocado, fuelling the climate crisis?

As pressure grows via social media to post pictures of food that ticks all the boxes in terms of health and the environment, these food stories from the author of the award-winning The Ethical Carnivore are also a personal story of motherhood and the realisation that nothing is ever perfect.

“The thought in my head does not yet have shape or form, only direction, one picture leading into another.”

An ageing artist, faced with his own mortality, embarks on one final artwork. As he battles to complete the project, working with an enigmatic young photographer, he finds his past and present blurring.

Through the act of creation and the memories it excavates, the artist comes to a realization about what matters most, and what he will leave behind when he is gone.

This hybrid and innovative short novel responds through fiction to ‘The New World’, the final artwork by the late artist Alan Smith. With sparkling, dreamlike prose, Bruton weaves a story around Smith’s art, arriving at both a profound exploration of the creative process and a timeless love story told in a new way.

Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life and volatile father. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, travelling the globe to study ancient organisms. When a trench is discovered in the Atlantic ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of the earth’s first life forms – what she instead finds calls into question everything we know about our own beginnings.

Her discovery leads Leigh to the Mojave desert and an ambitious new space agency. Drawn deeper into the agency’s work, she learns that the Atlantic trench is only one of several related phenomena from across the world, each piece linking up to suggest a pattern beyond human understanding. Leigh knows that to continue working with the agency will mean leaving behind her declining mother and her younger sister, and faces an impossible choice: to remain with her family, or to embark on a journey across the breadth of the cosmos.

Exploring the natural world with the wonder and reverence we usually reserve for the stars, In Ascension is a compassionate, deeply inquisitive epic that reaches outward to confront the greatest questions of existence, looks inward to illuminate the smallest details of the human heart, and shows how – no matter how far away we might be and how much we have lost hope – we will always attempt to return to the people and places we call home.

Jenny Boyd’s extraordinary life is the stuff of movies and novels, a story of incredible people and places experienced at a pivotal time in the 20th century.

As an up-and-coming young model, Jenny found herself at the heart of Carnaby Street in London, immersed in the fashion and pop culture of the Swinging 60s. With boyfriend Mick Fleetwood, sister Pattie, George Harrison and the rest of the Beatles, she lived the London scene. But as a natural Flower Child, Jenny soon became part of the counter-culture in San Francisco during the Flower Power era, witnessing the Summer of Love; she was the inspiration for Donovan’s famous song, Jennifer Juniper, and her photograph was featured inside the box set of his eponymous album A Gift from a Flower to a Garden.

After working in The Beatles shop, Apple, the first of its kind, Jenny attended Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram in India to study meditation with her sister and the Beatles, witnessing their creativity and the genesis of songs that would later appear on the White Album.

Despite being attuned to the spiritual bloom and innocence of the 60s, Jenny also experienced first-hand the turmoil and decadence of the 70s and 80s. Her two marriages to Mick Fleetwood, founder member of Fleetwood Mac, brought her to the forefront of the world of rock and roll – and its fame, money, drugs and heartache. Struggling in the darkness to find and develop her own voice and identity, Jenny went to college, achieving a Masters in Counselling Psychology and a PhD in Humanities – her dissertation on musicians and creativity became the critically-acclaimed book Musicians in Tune.

Jenny has spent her life in the company of some of the greatest musical and cultural influencers of the last 50 years – and the journey she takes to finding her own sense of self and creative ability makes Jennifer Juniper a truly captivating and inspiring story.

Ayobami Adebayo, the Women’s Prize-shortlisted author of Stay With Me, unveils a dazzling story of modern Nigeria and two families caught in the riptides of wealth, power, romantic obsession and political corruption.

Eniola is tall for his age, a boy who looks like a man. His father has lost his job, so Eniola spends his days running errands for the local tailor, collecting newspapers and begging, dreaming of a big future.

Wuraola is a golden girl, the perfect child of a wealthy family. Now an exhausted young doctor in her first year of practice, she is beloved by Kunle, the volatile son of family friends.

When a local politician takes an interest in Eniola and sudden violence shatters a family party, Wuraola and Eniola’s lives become intertwined. In this breathtaking novel, Ayobami Adebayo shines her light on Nigeria, on the gaping divide between the haves and the have-nots, and the shared humanity that lives in between.

Bhatarsaigh Agus Na Raiders highlights the significance and impact of the Vatersay Raiders, a landmark early 20th century episode which captured the public imagination and caused a political “furore” within politics and the media.

Gaelic-speaking Vatersay (Bhatarsaigh), the southernmost inhabited island in the Western Isles, became ‘the theatre upon which was fought one of the keenest conflicts in the struggle for land reform in the Hebrides’.

This is the story behind the Vatersay Land Raid, why it happened, what happened to those involved and the impact it made on the island that still resonates to this day.

You are not welcome here, godkiller.

Kissen’s family were killed by zealots of a fire god. Now, she makes a living killing gods, and enjoys it. That is until she finds a god she cannot kill: Skedi, a god of white lies, has somehow bound himself to a young noble, and they are both on the run from unknown assassins.

Joined by a disillusioned knight on a secret quest, they must travel to the ruined city of Blenraden, where the last of the wild gods reside, to each beg a favour.

Pursued by demons, and in the midst of burgeoning civil war, they will all face a reckoning – something is rotting at the heart of their world, and only they can be the ones to stop it.

Charles Edward Stuart’s campaign to seize the British throne on behalf of his exiled father ended with one of the quickest defeats in history: on 16 April 1746, at Culloden, his 5,000-strong Jacobite army was decisively overpowered in under forty minutes. Its brutal repercussions, however, endured for months and years, its legacy for centuries.

Paul O’Keeffe follows the Jacobite army, from its initial victories over Hanoverian troops at Prestonpans, Clifton and Falkirk to their calamitous defeat on the field of Culloden. He explores the battle’s aftermath which claimed the lives, not only of helpless wounded summarily executed and fugitives cut down by pursuing dragoons, but also of civilians slaughtered by vengeful government patrols as they ‘pacified’ the Highlands. He chronicles the wild, nationwide celebration greeting news of the government victory, the London stage catering to patriotic fervour with new songs like ‘God Save the King’, popular musical theatre, and operas by Gluck and Handel.

Meanwhile, the public was also treated to the grimmer spectacle of Jacobite prisoners, tried for high treason, paying for their participation on block and gibbet throughout the country. Many others – granted ‘the King’s mercy’ – suffered the lingering fate of forced labour on fever-ridden plantations in the West Indies and Virginia.

O’Keeffe reveals the unexpected consequences of the rising – mapping the Scottish Highlands to aid military subjugation would eventually lead to the foundation of the Ordnance Survey – and traces the later careers of the battle’s protagonists: the Duke of Cumberland’s transformation from idolised national hero to discredited ‘butcher’; Charles Edward Stuart’s from ‘Bonny Prince’ to embittered alcoholic invalid.

While in the long term the doomed Stuart cause acquired an aura of romanticism, the Jacobite Rising of 1745-46 remains one of the most bloody and divisive conflicts in British domestic history, which resonates to this day.

The real story that inspired the BBC drama, The Gold

On Saturday, 26 November 1983, an armed gang stole gold bullion worth almost £26 million from the Brink’s-Mat security depot near London’s Heathrow Airport. It was the largest robbery in world history, and only the start of an extraordinary story. For forty years, myths and legends have grown around the Brink’s-Mat heist and the events that followed.

The heist led to a wave of international money laundering, provided dirty money that helped fuel the London Docklands property boom, caused seismic changes in both British crime and policing, and has been linked to a series of deaths that continued until 2015.

The Gold is the conclusion of extensive research and includes exclusive testimony from one of the original robbers who gives his version of events for the first time. The result is the astonishing true story of the robbery of the century.

She dug her mother’s grave in the poison garden so it would stay hidden…

From the snowy winter woods to the bright midnight sun; from lost and powerless to finding your path, Now She is Witch conjures a world of violence and beauty – a world where women grasp at power through witchcraft, sexuality and performance, and most of all through throwing each other to the wolves.

Lux has lost everything when Else finds her, alone in the woods. Her family, her lover, her home – all burned. The world is suspicious of women like her. But Lux is cunning; she knows how to exploit people’s expectations, how to blend into the background. And she knows a lot about poisons.

Else has not found Lux by accident. She needs her help to seek revenge against the man who wronged her, and together they pursue him north. But on their hunt they will uncover dark secrets that entangle them with dangerous adversaries.

This is a witch story unlike any other.

From the twelve-million copy bestselling author of the Lewis trilogy comes a chilling new mystery set in the isolated Scottish Highlands.

A TOMB OF ICE

A young meteorologist checking a mountain top weather station in Kinlochleven discovers the body of a missing man entombed in ice.

A DYING DETECTIVE

Cameron Brodie, a Glasgow detective, sets out on a hazardous journey to the isolated and ice-bound village. He has his own reasons for wanting to investigate a murder case so far from his beat.

AN AGONIZING RECKONING

Brodie must face up to the ghosts of his past and to a killer determined to bury forever the chilling secret that his investigation threatens to expose.

Set against a backdrop of a frighteningly plausible near-future, A Winter Grave is Peter May at his page-turning, passionate and provocative best.

The 18th century saw Scotland become one of the leading international centres of literature, philosophy, and publishing and yet still retain its lively oral tradition of ballads and poetry. Scottish Poetry, 1730-1830 edited by Daniel Cook contains over 200 poems and songs written in Scots, English, and Gaelic which reflect this vibrant period of literary flourishing. The collection places Burns, Scott, and other major writers alongside lesser known or even entirely forgotten figures. Gaelic poets feature in their original language and in translation, along with many important long poems in their entirety. Lairds and ladies jostle with labouring-class writers, satirists with sentimentalists, Gaelic bards with Gothic balladists, rural singers with urbanite odists, and together they reveal the unrivalled range of Scottish poetry.

Czechoslovakia, Theresienstadt Concentration Camp, 1944. ‘I have to go away, my darling. Please, be brave, stay alive, for me.’ Her mother’s voice breaks. The little girl tries to stop the forbidden tears from falling, as the train takes her mother, and she is left alone…

Berlin, six years later. Hanni Winter shows her new husband around her first solo photography exhibition. But Freddy’s reaction is unexpected. His face white, he can’t take his eyes off the photo of a young girl around four years old. ‘That’s Renny,’ he whispers, ‘my sister, she was taken by the Nazis…’

Hanni remembers her perfectly – the child with the wide eyes and bitten lips, who wouldn’t let herself cry despite the chaos and cruelty all around them in the camp. Her heart had broken for the little girl as she took her picture, desperate to reveal the truth about the Nazis to the world. If that child is Renny, then they must try to find her. They must return to hell on earth.

But when Hanni arrives at the black and white arch of Theresienstadt, she comes face to face with a man she fears more than any other. Can she find the strength to fight again, or will every hope for the future be lost forever?

A heart-wrenching novel about love and courage in the face of terrible odds. Fans of The Alice Network, The Nightingale and The Tattooist of Auschwitz will need a box of tissues handy.