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100 Best Scottish Books

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Michel Faber - Under the Skin (2000)

Michel Faber - Under the Skin (2000)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Under the Skin is utterly compelling and thought-provoking from start to finish. It begins with a woman, Isserley, driving through the Highlands on the look-out for male hitchhikers. She doesn’t want any weaklings: they’ve got to be youngish, healthy…

David Lindsay - A Voyage to Arcturus (1920)

David Lindsay - A Voyage to Arcturus (1920)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

One of the greatest flights of fantasy in all of fantastic fiction, David Lindsay's debut is not only a metaphorical flight; it's also a quite literal one. Beginning with a séance in Hampstead and a journey to an observatory in north-east Scotland…

The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks (1984)

Iain Banks - The Wasp Factory (1984)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

They say that often an author's debut novel is his or her most autobiographical. Well if that's the case, heaven help Iain Banks. The Wasp Factory created a stushie amongst bamboozled literary critics who didn't know how to take this coruscating…

Adam Smith - The Wealth of Nations (1776)

Adam Smith - The Wealth of Nations (1776)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Margaret Thatcher, it is said, used to carry a copy of The Wealth of Nations in her handbag. It's an apocryphal story but highlights the fact that the deregulation of the 1980s was often undertaken in Adam Smith's name. Yet reading it today, 229 years…

Compton Mackenzie - Whisky Galore (1947)

Compton Mackenzie - Whisky Galore (1947)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Compton Mackenzie's timeless text is a triumph. Inspired by the real events of 1941, when a cargo ship ran aground in the channel between Eriskay and South Uist, Whisky Galore! is the gentle, comical story of how the booty on board became appropriated…

The White Bird Passes - Jessie Kesson (1958)

Jessie Kesson - The White Bird Passes (1958)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Although Kesson's novel gleans its title from Fiona MacLeod's poem 'The Valley of the White Poppies' (Fiona MacLeod being the pen name of the 19th century writer William Sharp, who is rightly associated with the most sentimentalising and kitsch excesses…

Kenneth Grahame - The Wind in the Willows (1908)

Kenneth Grahame - The Wind in the Willows (1908)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

As satirical works go, novels exporting the animal instinct have enjoyed a certain longevity, from George Orwell's Animal Farm to Pierre Boulle's Planet of the Apes. While more upbeat in temperament, Kenneth Grahame's cleverly imagined exposé of late…

Alexander Trocchi - Young Adam (1954)

Alexander Trocchi - Young Adam (1954)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Virtually forgotten by his death in 1984, Alexander Trocchi's Young Adam was one of the great beneficiaries of Rebel Inc's assault on the Scottish literary canon during the 90s. But it took David Mackenzie's excellent film adaptation, with Ewan McGregor…

James Kennaway - Tunes of Glory (1956)

James Kennaway - Tunes of Glory (1956)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

If James Kennaway were still alive he would be 76 and might well be considered the grand old man of Scottish fiction. Like Muriel Spark, though, he would probably live elsewhere: he disliked what he saw as the conformism and ‘inbred inferiority complex…

John Gibson Lockhart - Adam Blair (1822)

John Gibson Lockhart - Adam Blair (1822)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

In a society where church scandals are nothing new, it is hard to imagine the tale of a minister committing adultery causing a great uproar. But in 1822, JG Lockhart’s novel was heavily criticised for its portrayal of a widowed minister who has an…

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