THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

Among the giants of the Scottish Enlightenment, the name of James Hutton is overlooked. Yet his Theory of the Earth revolutionised the way we think about how our planet was formed and laid the foundation for the science of geology. He was in his time a doctor, a farmer, a businessman, a chemist yet he described himself as a philosopher – a seeker after truth.A friend of James Watt and of Adam Smith, he was a polymath, publishing papers on subjects as diverse as why it rains and a theory of language. He shunned status and official position, refused to give up his strong Scots accent and vulgar speech, loved jokes and could start a party in an empty room.Yet much of his story remains a mystery. His papers, library and mineral collection all vanished after his death and only a handful of letters survive. He seemed to be a lifelong bachelor, yet had a secret son whom he supported throughout his life.This book uses new sources and original documents to bring Hutton the man to life and places him firmly among the geniuses of his time.

Another Way to Split Water is a collection that has been evolving over many years. It is a book that captures many different versions of who the poet is now and who she has been formerly. The work within these pages is an homage to family – to how identity reforms and transforms throughout generations, through stories told and retold, imagined and reimagined. Perhaps most strikingly, this collection employs figurations of the natural world to reflect on themes of language, distance, migration, belonging, faith, grief, and intimacy.

Born the son of Scotland’s last telescope-maker, Stuart Braithwaite was perhaps always destined for a life of psychedelic adventuring on the furthest frontiers of noise in MOGWAI, one of the best loved and most groundbreaking post-rock bands of the past three decades.Modestly delinquent at school, Stuart developed an early appetite for ‘alternative’ music in what might arguably be described as its halcyon days, the late 80s. Discovering bands like Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, and Jesus and Mary Chain, and attending seminal gigs (often incongruously incognito as a young girl with long hair to compensate for his babyface features) by The Cure and Nirvana, Stuart compensated for his indifference to school work with a dedication to rock and roll … and of course the fledgling hedonism that comes with it.After an initial outing in the unfortunately (and provocatively named), Pregnant Nun, Stuart – alongside teenage friends Dominic Aitchison and Martin Bulloch – upgrades the band name to MOGWAI. They release their first single ‘Tuner/Lower’ in 1996. Championed by the legendary John Peel, and making a name for themselves for tinnitus-inducing live shows, MOGWAI’S subsequent single ‘Summer’ is named Single of the Week in NME. Their first album, Mogwai Young Team, follows to significant critical acclaim.Spaceships Over Glasgow is a lovesong to live rock and roll; to the passionate abandon we’ve all felt in the crowd (and some of us, if lucky enough, from the stage) at a truly incendiary gig. It is also the story of a life lived on the edge; of the high-times and hazardous pit-stops of international touring with a band of misfits and miscreants.

Cupar was created a royal burgh in 1328, though its name is Pictish, suggesting that there had been an important settlement there since the 7th or 8th century if not earlier. Until the 16th century it was among the richest royal burghs in Scotland, but declined in the 17th century, its trade handicapped by its distance from the sea. It flourished once again as a centre of the linen industry in the 18th century. As the county town of Fife, and a town which serviced travellers on their way from Edinburgh to Dundee and Aberdeen, Cupar became a ‘leisure town’, attracting well-off retired people and country gentry to its balls, horse races, theatre and library, as well as the services offered by banks, lawyers and doctors (and brothels).But by the mid 19th century the railway carried travellers through without stopping, industrial development shifted to west Fife where coal was plentiful, and St Andrews took over as the cultural centre of east Fife. Because the town did not develop major industries, it retains its medieval town plan and many fine buildings from its Georgian heyday.

Jay Gao’s debut collection Imperium introduces a compelling innovative talent. These poems layer together formal experiments, lyric intensity and occasionally sardonic perspectives on the contemporary. His perspective is refreshingly original: he writes as a Chinese-Scottish poet, critic and editor. He has published three pamphlets and is a contributing editor to The White Review. He divides his life between Edinburgh and Providence, Rhode Island.

What emerges in Imperium, in the uses and revisions of classical antecedents (Homer, Ovid, Sappho), is a sense of how to live in moments which are visited by, and never free of, the memory of trauma.

On a remote Scottish island, three couples are tying the knot – but even in paradise, nothing is pain-sailing…

Olivia and Anthony are planning A Very Extravagant Wedding at the newest hotel on the tiny Scottish island of Mure. They’re flying in chefs, musicians and something called a living flower wall… and no one is even allowed to think the word bridezilla.

Flora is trying – and failing – not to let Olivia and Anthony’s wedding distract her from planning her own big day with Joel. But the couple have wildly different ideas about how to celebrate and somehow, just when their relationship should be plain sailing, everything is suddenly very hard indeed.

And then there’s Lorna and Saif. The local headmistress and the GP desperately keeping their relationship a secret to protect his sons. But while they’re looking out for the boys, who’s looking out for them?

Three couples. One midsummer’s night. Can everyone get their happy ever after?

The novel follows the investigation, the trial, and the aftermath of the murder of Maxwell Robert Garvie, a real case that took place in Kincardineshire in 1968. Max’s wife, Sheila, occupied centre-stage in the prejudiced speculations that surrounded the trial. Thus, Sheila is the focus of the narrative, which seeks to uncover, as far as it can, the truth regarding Sheila’s involvement in her husband’s death.

Including flashbacks and new theories, the book suggests that appearances can be deceiving and reveals the shortcomings of a system uncaring about abuse victims. Through the point of view of several characters involved in the case, the narrative is made dynamic and gripping, and Sheila is revealed to be deeply flawed, but also deeply human.

Albania and Montenegro 1839, a setting of beauty and desolation. A land where centuries of bitter hatreds, atrocities and merciless revenge endlessly repeat themselves and simple lives are always in danger.

Enter the Pfiffmaklers, a group of travelling entertainers, on their way to visit the Black Madonna of Montenegro when they stumble across the remnants of a massacre.

Only one survivor remains, a little child who has seen too much. She captures the hearts of the kindly Pfiffmaklers, who take her with them away from danger. Or so they think.

A gorgeously illustrated book about friendship and looking past differences from the CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal winner Catherine Rayner.

Bear is walking through the forest, minding his own business when he comes across another bear. The Other bear is different. The two bears wander along, thinking different thoughts, and looking in different directions. Soon the two bears come across another bear and then another bear and eventually find a bear stuck in a tree. The bears realise that perhaps they aren’t that different after all and perhaps they could be friends?

The Long Golden Afternoon tells the story of the transformative generation of golf that followed the rise of Young Tom Morris – an era of sweeping change that saw Scotland’s national pastime become one of the rare games played around the world.

It begins with the first epochal performance after Tommy – John Ball’s victory at Prestwick in 1890 as the first Englishman and the first amateur to win the Open Championship – and continues through the outbreak of the Great War. If Tommy ignited the flame of golf in England, Ball’s breakthrough turned that smoldering fire into a conflagration.

The generation that followed would witness the game’s coming of age. It would see an explosion in golf’s popularity, the invention of revolutionary new balls and clubs, the emergence of professional tours, the organization of the game and its rules, a renaissance in writing and thinking about golf, and the decision that the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews must always remain the sport’s guiding light.

One hen weekend, seven secrets… but only one worth killing for.

Jen’s hen party is going to be out of control. She’s rented a luxury getaway on its own private island. The helicopter won’t be back for seventy-two hours. They are alone. They think.

As well as Jen, there’s the pop diva and the estranged ex-bandmate, the tennis pro and the fashion guru, the embittered ex-sister-in-law and the mouthy future sister-in-law. It’s a combustible cocktail, one that takes little time to ignite, and in the midst of the drunken chaos, one of them disappears. Then a message tells them that unless someone confesses her terrible secret to the others, their missing friend will be killed.

Problem is, everybody has a secret. And nobody wants to tell.

The two women’s eventful lives are intertwined. In the years before the First World War, the girls lose touch when Jeanie runs away from home and joins a dance company, while Lily attends The Mack, Glasgow’s famous school of art designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. A chance meeting reunites them and together they discover a Glasgow at the height of its wealth and power as the Second City of the Empire – and a city of poverty and overcrowding. Separated once again after the war, Lily and Jeanie find themselves on opposite sides of the world. Lily follows her husband to Shanghai while Jeanie’s dance career brings her international fame. But the glamour and dissolution of 1920s Shanghai finally lead Lily into peril. Her only hope of survival lies with her old friend Jeanie, as the two women turn to desperate measures to free Lily from danger.

What if going back means you could begin again?

Rocked by a terrible accident, homeless Kelly needs to escape the city streets of Glasgow. Maybe she doesn’t believe in serendipity, but a rare moment of kindness and a lost engagement ring conspire to call her home. As Kelly vows to reunite the lost ring with its owner, she must return to the small town she fled so many years ago.

On her journey from Glasgow to the south-west tip of Scotland, Kelly encounters ancient pilgrim routes, hostile humans, hippies, book lovers and a friendly dog, as memories stir and the people she thought she’d left behind for ever move closer with every step.

Full of compassion and hope, Paper Cup is a novel about how easy it can be to fall through the cracks, and what it takes to turn around a life that has run off course.

The ghosts of the past will not be silenced. Glasgow, 1983, and a beat constable walks away from a bar where he knows a crime is about to be committed. It is a decision that will haunt him for the rest of his life. In the present, an old fisherman is found dead by Kinloch’s shoreline and a stranger with a deadly mission moves into town. As past and present collide, D.C.I. Jim Daley must confront old friends, new foes and ghosts who will not be silenced.

Award-winning author Pippa Goodhart and illustrator Augusta Kirkwood have come together again, after their wonderful 2019 collaboration Daddy Frog and the Moon , to create this beautiful picture book about empathy and love. In a time when themes of friendship, love, family and loss are a focus of conversation, this gentle story with its fabulous illustrations will help parents and children come together to uncover the meaning of empathy. Can you be happy and sad at the same time? When Toby finds a mermaid stranded in a rock pool on the beach he takes her home and tries to cheer her up with songs, stories and a paddling pool full of bubbles. For a while Toby and the mermaid have fun but the more the mermaid sees the love Toby and his family have for each other the more she misses her own family and home. A story about feelings, love, happiness and letting go.

The Secret History of Here is the story of a single place, a farm in the Scottish Borders. The site on which Alistair Moffat’s farm now stands has been occupied since pre-historic times. The fields have turned up ancient arrow heads, stone spindles, silver pennies and a stone carved with the rune-like letters of Ogham. Walking this landscape you can feel the presence and see the marks of those who lived here before. But it is also the story of everywhere. In uncovering the history of one piece of land, Moffat shows how history is all around us, if only we have the eyes to see it. Under our feet, carved into the landscape, in the layout of paths and roads, in the stories we pass down, our history leaves its trace on the land. Taking the form of a journal of a year, The Secret History of Here is a walk through the centuries as much as the seasons. We hear the echo of battles long since fought, of lives lived quietly or scandalously, of armies, of kings, of the common folk who mostly inhabited this land, and a little of those that live here now.

Baggage is the story of Alan Cumming’s life in Hollywood, taking us through the highs and lows of his career, from his struggle with mental health and failed relationships to encounters with legends (Liza! X Men! Gore Vidal! Kubrick! Spice Girls!).

Cumming shows how every experience – each bad decision or moment of sensual joy – has shaped who he is today: a happy, flawed, vulnerable, fearless middle-aged man, with a lot of baggage. Startlingly honest, both poignant and joyous, Baggage shines a light on how to embrace the complicated messiness of life.

If the truth’s in the shadows, get out of the light …

Lawyer Bobby Carter did a lot of work for the wrong type of people. Now he’s dead and it was no accident. Besides a distraught family and a heap of powerful friends, Carter’s left behind his share of enemies. So, who dealt the fatal blow?

DC Jack Laidlaw’s reputation precedes him. He’s not a team player, but he’s got a sixth sense for what’s happening on the streets. His boss chalks the violence up to the usual rivalries, but is it that simple? As two Glasgow gangs go to war, Laidlaw needs to find out who got Carter before the whole city explodes.

William McIlvanney’s Laidlaw books changed the face of crime fiction. When he died in 2015, he left half a handwritten manuscript of Laidlaw’s first case. Now, Ian Rankin is back to finish what McIlvanney started. In The Dark Remains, these two iconic authors bring to life the criminal world of 1970s Glasgow, and Laidlaw’s relentless quest for truth.

A hugely gripping, fast-paced mystery adventure, with brilliant twists and turns, from a fresh and exciting new voice in children’s books.

When twelve-year-old Lily moves to the sleepy seaside town of Edge, she’s sure that nothing exciting is ever going to happen to her again. But when she stumbles upon a secret museum hidden in the middle of town, she realises that there might be more to her new home than meets the eye.

The Museum of Emily is filled with the belongings of one seemingly ordinary girl – a girl who, many years ago, disappeared from the town without a trace. With the help of her new friends Sam and Jay, Lily is determined to solve the mystery and find out who Emily was, why she disappeared and who has created the strange, hidden museum.

With a one-of-a-kind mystery, a brilliant trio of protagonists, and an action-filled story, Looking for Emily is the unmissable middle grade debut of 2022.

Take a sip and enter the world of the dead…

As the station prepares to close down for good, DI Georgie Strachan is running out of time to find out what is really going on in Burrowhead and put a stop to it. A deadly drug appears in the small Scottish village, best consumed with the blood of a freshly slaughtered animal. But what does this have to do with the deaths and suicides? And who is responsible for supplying it?

As rituals and threats reach a frantic high, no one wants to speak. It seems the drug is ingrained in the very fabric of the village. Suspects abound as Georgie questions who she can really trust.