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100 Best Scottish Books

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Behind the Scenes at the Museum - Kate Atkinson (1995)

1 Jan 2005

How many books have you read recently that begin with 25 pages conducted, quite amicably, from inside the womb? This one, told in part through the eyes of unwanted baby Ruby Lennox (conception onwards), and in part through the tragic history of her…

Black and Blue - Ian Rankin (1997)

1 Jan 2005

Ian Rankin is one of this country’s most prolific and commercially successful authors. No writer has chronicled the changing face of Edinburgh so vividly nor in such minute detail. Since 1987’s Knots and Crosses, the investigations of his celebrated…

Born Free - Laura Hird (1999)

1 Jan 2005

Laura Hird's Born Free is a masterpiece of contemporary urban fiction. It is also a quintessentially Scottish book: funny but dark, malevolent but life affirming, poignant but endearingly compulsive. First published in 1999, Born Free followed Hird's…

Brond - Frederic Lindsay (1984)

1 Jan 2005

A political thriller, but a cut above the disposable airport novels of Tom Clancy, Brond throws a serpentine plot of political intrigue into central Scotland. After witnessing the mysterious Brond kill a child in Kelvingrove Park, student Robert is…

Buddha Da - Anne Donovan (2003)

1 Jan 2005

From the opening paragraph of Buddha Da, there is a lyrical beauty about this book. It reminds me of my favourite songs, the ones that take me somewhere special whenever I hear them. So it is with Anne Donovan’s novel. The story of Jimmy, the Glaswegian…

But n Ben A-Go-Go - Matthew Fitt (2000)

1 Jan 2005

Who would have thought that the third millennium would blast off with a sci-fi novel written in Scots? Matthew Fitt’s debut leaves granny’s hieland hame behind and claims the Scots language for writing that is out of this world. Fitt is one of the…

Children of the Dead End - Patrick MacGill (1914)

1 Jan 2005

Patrick MacGill’s autobiographical novel roams from the tenant farms of Ireland and the grinding poverty of Dermod Flynn’s childhood, to the byways and backroads of Scotland and the navvying life. Leaving home at the age of 12 to seek work ‘beyond the…

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater - Thomas De Quincey (1822)

1 Jan 2005

Thomas De Quincey’s debut is an intense exploration of the liminal, from the evanescing ‘beatific druggist’ and the illuminatus prostitute of Oxford Street to the phantasmagoric godfather of logos revolutionaries such as Baudelaire, Kafka, Woolf…

Consider the Lilies - Iain Crichton Smith (1968)

1 Jan 2005

Iain Crichton Smith was, and is, lovingly acknowledged as one of modern Scotland’s foremost writers, wits and all-round ‘characters’. Generations of readers have grown up holding close to their hearts (and exam cram sheets) one or other of his terse…

Docherty - William McIlvanney (1975)

1 Jan 2005

Docherty is the most brilliant, forceful and yet measured example of William McIlvanney’s desire to ‘give working-class life the vote in the literature of heroism’. The struggles of the eponymous Docherty family in the early decades of the 20th century…

Found 100 articles.

Sorted by date / most viewed. Showing 10, 25, 50, 100 per page.