THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

Anthony Burgess was an energetic writer and composer, but his work for the stage is not as well known as it deserves to be. In Two Plays, we see him tackling major monuments of French and Russian theatre: The Miser by Molière and Chatsky by Alexander Griboyedov.

Miser, Miser! is a bold reworking of Molière’s classic comedy of 1668. Harpagon the miser is hoarding a pile of gold, which he has buried in his garden. As he tries to sell off his daughter, catch himself a beautiful young bride, and outwit his scheming household of clever servants, the comedy of errors intensifies. Although the original French play is written in prose, Burgess remakes it in a mixture of verse and prose, in the style of his famous adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac. This translation, discovered in the author’s archive, is the work of a writer working at the height of his powers. It is an attempt to reinvent Molière for modern audiences.

Chatsky, subtitled ‘The Importance of Being Stupid’ is another verse comedy. The theme is that of the intellectual hero who rebels against the smug, philistine society in which he finds himself. First performed in 1833, Griboyedov’s play was so heavily cut by Russian censors that it was barely recognisable. The play is a virtuoso vehicle for male actors, and the source of many famous quotations. It is also notoriously difficult to translate. In Chatsky, Burgess remakes a classic Russian play in the spirit of Oscar Wilde. It is a great feast of language and invective.

The complete texts of both plays are published here for the first time.  Two Plays confirms Anthony Burgess’s reputation as a gifted writer for the stage, and as a translator of great wit and sophistication.

Ruby’s dad has arrived home with a wonderful surprise – Coco the sausage dog puppy! And when the family go on holiday to the seaside, of course Coco will be coming too. The beach is a thrilling place for a dog – so many sights, smells and holes to dig! Ruby and Coco can’t wait to spend the day splashing in the waves and playing in the sand. But disaster strikes when Coco disappears. Suddenly she’s lost and all alone on the huge, busy beach … Will she ever find her way back to Ruby?

Worldwide bestseller Holly Webb makes her Barrington Stoke debut with a truly adorable sausage-dog tale!

Crumbs on the counter, morsels on the floor – there should be plenty of food for Minetta the mouse to eat in Hollyhock House …

But the Ruling Rats are running rampage every night, taking the best of everything for themselves. Minetta has decided that enough is enough ? it?s time the rats learn to share. The trouble is, Minetta is so small and her voice just a squeak. How will she ever make them listen …?

A gorgeous Little Gem about finding the courage to make your voice heard from Pip Jones the award-winning author of Izzy Gizzmo.

Dimple the gnome is upset and he doesn’t know how to talk about it – but then along comes the Boo … A charming new Gem from the bestselling author of Squishy McFluff.

Oh dear, Dimple the Gnome is having a very bad day and he just can’t find the right words to tell anyone how he’s feeling. Then Dimple finds the Boo, who lets everyone know what’s going on. But the Boo’s rude words and naughty noises just get Dimple into trouble. Can Dimple find another way to express himself?

A humorous novel by Joseph & Laura T. BakerWhen a group of guys and girls meet at the psychology department of Edinburgh University while pursuing postgraduate studies, romantic, satirical, and exciting events unfold. The characters, some of whom are therapists themselves, find themselves in all kinds of psychological dilemmas.There?s Gabriella who is always about to mercilessly break up with someone whom she was madly in love with less than a week ago. She wanted to quit even after she graduated. There?s George who is an American intellectual searching for the perfect girl, the dream job, and his Irish roots. Anna is a Russian princess ? or at least that?s what she thinks ? studying psychotherapy to help everyone but most importantly herself. Ilenia is an artist who doesn?t know why she?s here. Then there?s Tom who is obsessed with the adverse effects of religions on people?s psyche. Andrew strives for a world where people don?t suffer because of who they are – but that doesn?t include any of the people he despises. Sara would rather party every night than touch a book.They fell in love with the city, and every night brings a story that begs to be told.

The Highland Clearances was a dark episode in Scottish history when many thousands of people were forced off lands that they and their kin had lived on for generations. Some boarded ships destined for the colonies of America and Australia, others ended up on small barren plots by the coast or in city slums. A few men were outspoken against the atrocities, and one of them was Donald Ross.Donald Ross was a Highlander, born in Sutherland in 1813. His father was the miller on the Skibo Castle Estate and Donald took over the mill when his father died. He and his family were subsequently evicted, fighting against their eviction in the Supreme Court but losing the case. Donald moved to Glasgow and within two years, as Agent for the Poor, helped over 1,500 people receive poor-relief payments, which were being withheld by local parish boards. In the 1850s Donald became the most outspoken critic of the Highland Clearances and wrote many detailed newspaper articles and pamphlets about mass evictions on Barra, Knoydart and Skye. His most famous publication was The Massacre of the Rosses, in which he graphically described the women of Strathcarron being brutally beaten by policemen for refusing to accept eviction notices. Donald supplied over 8,000 books and pamphlets for emigrants on the ill-fated Hercules. He also raised a lot of money to help poor people in the Hebrides, particularly during the infamous Potato Famine. However, Donald?s efforts were cut short by a scandal that saw him and his family emigrate to Nova Scotia.Donald?s inspirational story makes him an unsung hero of the poor.

‘The legendary Quintin Jardine . . . such a fine writer’ DENZIL MEYRICK

Amidst a family celebration, a cataclysmic storm uncovers long-buried horrors – and a team of detectives struggle to solve a thirty-year-old double murder. The police are also searching two countries for traces of a mysterious crime novelist who appears to have vanished. Has the faking of his own death been his masterpiece?

Alongside each inquiry as it evolves is former Chief Constable Sir Robert Skinner, relishing his new role as a media magnate, but drawn into reluctant action and towards a chilling discovery of his own.With evil on one hand and intrigue on the other, will Skinner escape with either his integrity or career intact . . . or is it open season on him?

Praise for Quintin Jardine’s Bob Skinner series:

‘Scottish crime-writing at its finest, with a healthy dose of plot twists and turns, bodies and plenty of brutality’ SUN

‘Well constructed, fast-paced, Jardine’s narrative has many an ingenious twist and turn’ OBSERVER

Search for fortune on the high seas with this abridged retelling of Treasure Island, part of the bestselling Classic Starts® series that has sold more than 8 million copies! After Jim Hawkins finds the map to a mysterious treasure, he sets sail in search of the fortune. Little does he realize he?s boarded a pirate ship, and that surprises and danger await him . . . including a meeting with the unforgettable Long John Silver! This abridged retelling is the perfect way to introduce young readers to the swashbuckling adventure that has captivated readers for centuries!

**Shipwrecks, dive bars, possession, and science – this is where contemporary horrors and ancient terrors meet. **

In Fresh Dirt from the Grave, a hillside is ‘an emerald saddle teeming with evil and beauty.’ It is this collision of harshness and tenderness that animates Giovanna Rivero’s short stories, where no degree of darkness (buried bodies, lost children, wild paroxysms of violence) can take away from the gentleness she shows all violated creatures. A mad aunt haunts her family, two Bolivian children are left on the outskirts of a Metis reservation outside Winnipeg, a widow teaches origami in a women’s prison and murders, housefires, and poisonings abound, but so does the persistent bravery of people trying to forge ahead in the face of the world. They are offered cruelty, often, indifference at best, and yet they keep going. Rivero has reworked the boundaries of the gothic to engage with pre-Columbian ritual, folk tales, sci-fi and eroticism, and found in the wound their humanity and the possibility of hope.

Jana is on the cusp of adulthood; she’s started dating her first boyfriend and is getting ready to leave her war-torn hometown, to provide for her family. However, when she wakes up in a basement in Sarajevo, it is clear that life doesn’t always follow the plans we make for it. Exploring the currency of female bodies in an underground world, Ella Dorman-Gajic’s Trade powerfully calls into question the archetype of the ‘perfect female victim’ by examining the psychology of a morally complex protagonist.

Trade was awarded an OffComm at its critically acclaimed premiere.

CASTING 2-4 women / 1-4 men

What would you risk to build a better world?

It’s been a harsh winter. Outside the city walls, people are starving. Inside, the rich townspeople hoard their grain and gold.  Like his father before him, Jacob must serve the elite and keep those who steal in order. He fixes their broken bones, sews up their wounds, and then chops off their heads.

Jacob believes he will keep the peace better through solely healing, but he desperately needs the town’s blessing. Little does he know that others close to him have far more radical plans for change.

Grounded in the past but distinctly contemporary, this unique debut from Theo Chester uses bold storytelling to create an uneasy yet wonderfully strange new world.

Stray Dogs is the work of writer Theo Chester and director Tommo Fowler. Produced by Cindy McLean-Bibby and Theatre503.

Running time: 2 hours 30 mins (inc. 15 minute interval)

Age guidance: 14+

Commissioned by The International School of London.

An actor (Top Boy), a rapper, a group of school students, a university scientist and two NGO activists from Beirut have little in common but their lives are all affected by Covid-19. Mark Wheeller’s new verbatim play tells their stories. It is explosive and fascinating in turns – it is not only their story – it’s ours too.These recollections offer positive journeys through the pandemic, contrasted with the horror of the 2020 Port of Beirut explosion, included as one of the student’s family decided to return to their Lebanon home during lockdown. This story provides the most heartbreaking moments.Pandemexplosion offers a diverse ensemble cast ample opportunity for imaginative theatrical interpretation typical of a classic Wheeller play.

Duration: 75 minutes approx

Cast: 20 (8f, 9m, 3m or f)

 

Alan Riach’s The MacDiarmid Memorandum is a work of epic, category-defying scope; a work that blends biography and national history, poetry and prose; an intimate portrait of an old friend and mentor, and a political manifesto calling for revolution. Beginning with his childhood in Langholm, Riach shows us MacDiarmid’s first attempts to orient the Scottish landscape, a world in which so-called natural features are interwoven with and inseparable from the political. It is in orientating his surroundings that MacDiarmid takes his first steps on a journey towards a peculiarly Scottish kind of consciousness; a consciousness that both wills itself to be free, and bows under the weight of its own self-suppression. This is a work that charts a war on various fronts: in MacDiarmid’s personal life, he experienced periods of unemployment, destitution, alcoholism, divorce, trauma; and at the same time, the country entered two major world wars, in turn triggering a renaissance of Scottish artists and intellectuals, struggling (on their own front) for recognition and self-determination.Riach’s idea for The MacDiarmid Memorandum originated in an exhibition, Landmarks: Poets, Portraits and Landscapes of Modern Scotland, which showcased major 20th century Scottish poets alongside paintings by critically acclaimed artists, Alexander Moffat and Ruth Nichol, with a particular focus on Scottish landscapes and portraits of the relevant poets. Included in this book, alongside Riach’s poems, are reproductions of some of the original paintings that appeared in the exhibition, offering a vivid, feeling complement to Riach’s text.

Around 1885, Alfred Barnard was secretary of Harper’s Weekly Gazette, a journal dedicated to the wine and spirit trade. In order to provide his readers with the history and descriptions of the whisky-making process, Barnard decided to visit all distilleries in Scotland, England and Ireland. Accompanied by friends, he visited over 150 distilleries. The names found in his reports still excite the dedicated whisky connoisseur today, as well as others whose fame has faded since the end of the 19th century. The appeal of Barnard’s book lies not only in the technical descriptions of each distillery’s processes, but also in the colourful descriptions of his journeys, brimming with historical colour and detail. A superbly illustrated facsimile edition, with over 200 engravings, this book is a complete guide to the origins of Scotland’s national drink, as well as a lively picture of life and travel in the Victorian age.

Two thousand years ago, southern Scotland was part of a great empire, the Roman Empire. About AD 140, a Roman army marched north from what is now Northumbria and, 20 years after and over 100 miles further north than Hadrian’s Wall, built a new frontier across the Forth-Clyde isthmus. With reference to contemporary coins and literary sources together with the archaeological remains, inscriptions and sculpture from the Antonine Wall itself, David Breeze explains the historical context for, and the creation of, the fortifications. Stunning photography by David Henrie of Historic Scotland illustrates all aspects of this most northerly Roman frontier. These photographs help us to appreciate the Antonine Wall in its landscape and allow us a visual explanation for its construction almost 2000 years ago.

The Battle of Pinkie, fought between the English and the Scots in 1547, was the last great clash between the two as independent nations. It is a well-documented battle with several eyewitness accounts and contemporary illustrations. There is also archaeological evidence of military activities. The manoeuvres of the two armies can be placed in the landscape near Edinburgh, despite considerable developments since the 16th century. Nevertheless, the battle and its significance has not been well understood.From a military point of view there is much of interest. The commanders were experienced and had already had battlefield successes. There was an awareness on both sides of contemporary best practice and use of up-to-date weapons and equipment. The Scots and the English armies, however, were markedly different in their composition and in the strategy and tactics they employed. There is the added ingredient that the fire from English ships, positioned just off the coast, helped decide the course of events.Using contemporary records and archaeological evidence, David Caldwell, Victoria Oleksy, and Bess Rhodes reconsider the events of September 1547. They explore the location of the fighting, the varied forces involved, the aims of the commanders, and the close-run nature of the battle. Pinkie resulted in a resounding victory for the English, but that was by no means an inevitable outcome. After Pinkie it briefly seemed as if the future of Britain had been redefined. The reality proved rather different, and the battle has largely slipped from popular consciousness. This book provides a reminder of the uncertainty and high stakes both Scots and English faced in the autumn of 1547.

For almost 150 years until the late twentieth century, French Onion Johnnies (or ‘Ingan Johnnies’, as they were usually known in Scotland) were a familiar group of seasonal workers in towns and cities throughout Britain.

In this book, nine Onion Johnnies (including one ‘Jenny’) who worked in Scotland at one time or another between the 1920s and the 1970s recount their lives. The recollections, recorded in interviews in Brittany and at Leith in 1999 by the Scottish Working People’s History Trust, provide a fascinating insight into the lives and experience of those whose livelihood and way of life have vanished forever. It paints a poignant picture of the past and a way of life about nothing in any detail has ever been published before.

On the eve of an important battle, a colonel is visited in his tent by an indigenous woman with a message to pass on. A man sets about renovating the house of his childhood, and starts to feel that he might be rebuilding his own life in the process. At a private clinic to treat the morbidly obese, a caregiver has issues of her own…

Acclaimed writer and poet Jorge Consiglio presents a universe of seemingly unrelated tales, linked perhaps by a certain rhythm in the prose or subtle dimensions of violence and perversion. These are stories of immigration, marginality, history, intimacy and obsession which are masterful and deeply touching, domestic yet universal. They each present their own distinctive view of the world through the lives of their respective characters – who are as dissimilar as they are complex – and the profound transformations they undergo. As reflections on the uncontrollable nature of life, as depictions of how even the most innocent detail can become a threat, these stories do not offer neat endings but rather remain open to the reader’s sense of inquisitiveness.

Southerly is a perfect introduction to what has been called ‘the Consiglian logic of story-telling’ (Cabezón Cámara), in which events don’t always occur sequentially, and where the reader quickly learns to tiptoe between the tiniest of details, as if they formed a minefield.

The Usurpers, Willa Muir’s fourth novel, was written in the early 1950s and was based on the diaries she kept in Prague in the period 1945-1948, when her husband the poet Edwin Muir was the Director the British Institute in Prague, the lecturing and teaching arm of the British Council there. Under the guise of Utopians in Slavomania, The Usurpers offers acute, humorous and sometimes acerbic observations on relations among the British themselves in Prague (the city is never named) and between them and their Czech friends and those in the Czechoslovak establishment who were suspicious of the British presence, and depicts, largely through the actions and conversation of its characters, a deteriorating political environment in which the lives of many Slavomanians and even some of the Utopians are increasingly under threat in the lead-up to the Communist coup of February 1948. The Usurpers was ready for publication in 1952 and was submitted to a number of major UK publishers under the pen-name Alexander Cory. The publishers were nervous. There was some concern about libel suits and perhaps also about the political sensitivity of the contents. Then, when she was publicly revealed to be the author, Willa Muir withdrew it. The typescript, from which this edition has been prepared, has long been in the care of the Library of the University of St Andrews and over the years a number of critics and Willa Muir enthusiasts have read it, among them Jim Potts, who brought it to the attention of Colenso Books and who has provided the Introduction. The non-publication of the The Usurpers in the 1950s may have been partly due to political pressure, at a time when the UK government’s grant-in-aid to the British Council was being called in question.

From a comic mastermind comes this brilliant collection of stories.

Three teenagers believe they are witches. A woman defaces a local billboard. A bored landlord tries to influence his son’s best friend. A cul-de-sac WhatsApp group discusses eggs at length. A heavily pregnant woman finds a way to time travel and a girl discovers joy on a stolen bicycle . . .

Each tale paints a life in miniature and offers an escape chute from the mayhem of modern life.