Scottish Authors and Authors who have written
about the Scottish landscape and culture.
 Whisky
Galore Love makes the world go round?
Not at all. Whisky makes it go round twice as fast.The hilarious
story of wartime bootlegging in the Scottish islands.Wartime
food rationing is bad enough, but when the whisky supplies run
out on the Hebridean islands of Great and Little Todday, nothing
seems to go right. Then the 50,000-bottle cargo of the shipwrecked
S.S. Cabinet Minister brings salvation - in its most giddily
intoxicating form.
Buddha
Da Anne Marie's Da, a Glaswegian painter and decorator,
has always been game for a laugh. So when he first takes up
meditation at the Buddhist Centre, no one takes him seriously
(especially when his pursuit of the new lama ends in a trip
round the Carmunnock bypass). But as Jimmy becomes more involved
in a search for the spiritual, his beliefs start to come into
conflict with the needs of his wife, Liz. Cracks appear in their
apparently happy family life, and the ensuing events change
the lives of each family member.
44
Scotland Street Alexander McCall Smith tackles issues of
trust and honesty, snobbery and hypocrisy, love and loss, but
all with great lightness of touch. Clever, elegant and funny,
this is a novel that provides huge entertainment but which is
underpinned by the moral dilemmas of everyday life and the characters'
struggles to resolve them.
 Electric
Brae At the centre of the novel is the crumbling seastack
of the Old Man of Hoy and the consuming relationship between
a young artist, Kim, coldly passionate, talented, secretive,
and Jimmy, a North Sea roughneck, engineer and climber. It deals
with the possibility of friendship between men and women.
The
Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and... This work provides
a thesis based on the idea that man progresses from magic through
religious belief to scientific thought. It discusses fertility
rites, human sacrifice, the dying god, the scapegoat and many
other symbols and practices.
 Interrogation
of Silence: The Writings... George Mackay Brown. George
Mackay Brown is a precise, poetic and dazzling writer. A wonderful
introduction to his work.
The
Gowk Storm (Canongate Classics) Oddballs, tinks, heidbangers,
saints, keelies, nutters, philosophers and freaks. These apparently
marginal lives are not only interesting in their own right but
often tell us more about the mores of a country or a time than
the lives of its better known citizens
Crowdie
and Cream and Other Stories By Finlay J. Macdonald. An absorbing
account of adolescence on the western islands of Scotland.
Imagined
Selves: "Imagined Corners",... This is a collection of the
fiction and non-fiction of Willa Muir, wife to the famous poet
Edwin Muir. Much of the writing features an autobiographical
element which is sometimes difficult to separate from the fictional
content.
 The
Hills Is Lonely Lillian Beckwith's account of her stay on
Bruach has hardly been out of print since it first appeared
in 1957. Read it and you will understand why. Re-live her experiences
of the market day punch-up, the attempt to tow some cows from
an even more remote island in a small rowing boat behind a rickety
fishing boat and, above all, the funeral of Ian Mor. I laughed
out loud.
Morvern
Callar Warner's narrarive style draws heavily on the style
in which real life Highlanders tell each other tales of the
week's wildness when they meet up down the pub. We call this
telling one another 'stories'.
 The
Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Penguin... She was a schoolmistress
with a difference. Proud, cultured, romantic, her ideas were
progressive, even shocking. And when she decided to transform
a group of young girls under her tutelage into the "creme
de la creme" of Marcia Blaine school, no one could have
predicted the outcome.
A
Glasgow Trilogy: "Boy Who Wanted... Dealing with universal
themes such as happiness and grief, work and unemployment, young
love and marriage, and despair and hope, this series of books
all focus on Glasgow.
 The
Vital Spark: The Illustrated Para... Handy. The hilarious
exploits of Para Handy and his crew - beloved by readers since
Neil Munro first set them loose on an unsuspecting public all
those years ago - are now part of Scotland's genetic make-up.
But despite the tales of the Master Mariner, Dougie the Mate,
Macphail the Engineer, Sunny Jim and The Tar being in print
for almost a century, never before have they received such remarkable
treatment.
The
Shipbuilders As the last ship on the yard's books goes down
the slipway, the future looks desperately bleak for Pagan's,
a proud and long-established Clydeside shipyard struggling to
survive during the Great Depression. This novel focuses on the
experiences of two men whose lives are irrevocably changed by
the yard's closure.
 The
Cone-gatherers The Cone-Gatherers is set in the middle of
World War II on a country estate in Scotland. The estate's wood
is to be cut down soon to provide wood for the war effort, and
two men have been sent into the wood by the forestry service
to collect cones for seed. The men are brothers, and the younger
is a simple-minded but very empathetic hunchback with "a
face like Lord Byron". Through no fault of their own, the
brothers acquire the irrational hatred of the estate's gamekeeper.
The wood, itself lying under the shadow of ruin, quickly becomes
a dangerous and mysterious setting in which the problem of evil
plays out to tragedy.
 Scottish
Journey: A Modern Classic First published in 1935, this
is an account of Edwin Muir's journey around Scotland, from
Edinburgh to the Lowlands, Glasgow and the Highlands. Not just
a piece of travel writing, it is also a quest for the real nature
of Scottish identity.
 Under
Brinkie's Brae For many years George Mackay Brown wrote
a weekly column in The Orcadian, and this book is the second
of three selections from the column which have been published
in book form, the others being 'Letters from Hamnavoe' and 'Rockpools
and Daffodils'. 'Under Brinkie's Brae' was published in hardback
in 1979, and this is the first paperback edition to appear.
These selections from George Mackay Brown's long-running column
offer more of his honest opinions, perceptive descriptions and
evocative writing. Managing to be both matter-of-fact and highly
individual, they are a breath of fresh air from Orkney.
 Literary
Britain and Ireland
Britain's counties are rich in associations with writers past
and present. In 10 region-by-region chapters, "Literary
Britain and Ireland" features sites connected with every
branch of literature, including sacred writings, humorous stories,
children's novels, poetry, plays and all types of fiction. The
book is a treasure trove of information, revealing the birthplaces,
homes, schools, workplaces and inspirations of writers from
Robert Louis Stevenson and William Wordsworth to Roddy Doyle
and J.K. Rowling. Jane Struthers provides a lively commentary
on each region, from Northern Scotland through England and Wales
and across the Irish Sea, the land is littered with literary
geniuses. Each chapter is accompanied by a full-colour map and
Chris Coe's fabulous photography.
 A
Reader's Guide to Writers' Britain
Tours the places that capture the minds of our most enduring
and popular literary figures and the landscapes in whic their
characters walked. Both a wonderful bedside companion and essential
travel guide, this book is filled with over 600 pictures, maps
and a gazetteer of museums and house open to the public.
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