Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Books
Scottish writing is alive and well and so prolific that it can be di
cult to keep
up with it. This selection covers both classic and modern, and titles marked
with
Ì
are particularly recommended.
FICTION
Ì
Iain Banks
The Bridge
,
The Crow Road
,
Espedair Street
,
A Song of Stone
,
The Wasp Factory
,
Dead Air, The Steep
Approach to Garbadale
. Just a few titles by this astonishingly
prolific author, who also wrote sci-fi as Iain M. Banks. His
work can be funny, pacy, thought-provoking, imaginative
and downright disgusting, but it is never dull. His final
novel,
The Quarry
, was published posthumously in 2013.
Christopher Brookmyre
One Fine Day In the Middle of
the Night
,
The Sacred Art of Stealing
,
A Tale Etched in Blood
and Hard Black Pencil
and
Bedlam
. All very funny, inventive
novels that refuse to be categorized - you'll probably find
them in the crime section, but they're as much
politico-satirical.
John Buchan
The Complete Richard Hannay
. This single
volume includes
The 39 Steps, Greenmantle, Mr Standfast,
The Three Hostages
and
The Island of Sheep
. Good
gung-ho stories with a great feel for the Scottish
landscape. Less well known, but better, are Buchan's
historical romances such as
Midwinter
, a Jacobite thriller,
and
Witchwood
(audio only), a tale of religious strife in
the seventeenth century.
Anne Donovan
Hieroglyphics,
her first collection of short
stories, and
Budda Da
, her hilarious first novel, were both
nominated for major prizes, and rightly so. Her novel
Being
Emily
is about growing up in Glasgow.
Ì
Lewis Grassic Gibbon
A Scots Quair.
A landmark
trilogy set in northeast Scotland during and after World
War I, the events seen through the eyes of Chris Guthrie,
torn between her love for the land and her desire to escape
a peasant culture.
Alasdair Gray
Lanark: A Life in Four Books.
A postmodern
blend of social realism and labyrinthine fantasy. Gray's
extraordinary debut as a novelist, featuring his own
allegorical illustrations, takes invention and comprehension
to their limits.
Ì
Neil M. Gunn
The Silver Darlings
. Probably Gunn's
most representative and best-known book, evocatively set
on the northeast coast and telling the story of herring
fishermen during the great years of the industry.
James Hogg
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a
Justified Sinner
. Complex, dark mid-nineteenth-century
novel dealing with possession, myth and folklore, looking
at the confession of an Edinburgh murderer from three
different points of view.
Jackie Kay
Trumpet
. The protagonist is dead before the
novel begins. He was a black Scottish jazz trumpeter,
who left a wife in mourning and a son in deep shock, for
the posthumous medical report revealed him to be a
woman. Kay is also a poet.
Red Dust Road
is a warm and
moving memoir of growing up black, gay and adopted in
1960s Glasgow.
James Kelman
Busconductor Hines
. The wildly funny
story of a young Glasgow bus conductor with an intensely
boring job and a limitless imagination.
How Late it Was,
How Late
is Kelman's Booker Prize-winning and disturbing
look at life as seen through the eyes of a foul-mouthed,
blind Glaswegian drunk.
Ì
A.L. Kennedy
Looking for the Possible Dance.
This
talented writer dissects the di
culties of human
relationships on a personal and wider social level. More
recent novels
So I Am Glad, Original Bliss
and
Paradise
have
the same deft touch, as do her collections of short stories,
Indelible Acts
and
What Becomes.
Alexander McCall Smith
44 Scotland Street
and
The
Sunday Philosophy Club
series.
Prolific author of feel-good
novels set in middle-class Edinburgh: the
44 Scotland Street
series centres on the occupants of the address and
The
Sunday Philosophy Club
novels are gentle detective yarns
with a female amateur sleuth.
Naomi Mitchison
The Bull Calves
is set in 1747 and
comments on the terrible after-effects of Jacobite
rebellion.
Lobster on the Agenda
, written in 1952, closely
mirrors contemporary life in Kyntyre where Mitchison lived.
Ì
Ian Rankin
The Hanging Garden,
The Falls
and
Fleshmarket Close
. Superbly plotted dark stories featuring
Rebus, the famous maverick police detective who haunts
the bars of Edinburgh. Made into a TV series and the subject
of a guided tour in the city. Rebus retired in
Exit Music
, but
returned in
Standing in Another Man's Grave
.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Five Red Herrings.
A complicated tale
involving railway timetables set in Gatehouse of Fleet in
Galloway, but solved by Lord Peter Wimsey.
Sir Walter Scott
The Waverley Novels.
The books that
did much to create the romanticized version of Scottish
life and history.
Muriel Spark
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
. Wonderful
evocation of middle-class Edinburgh life and aspirations.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
,
The
