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100 Best Scottish Books

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Miss Marjoribanks - Margaret Oliphant (1866)

1 Jan 2005

Fittingly for a 'heroine' of Victorian literature, Lucilla, the eponymous Miss Marjoribanks of Margaret Oliphant's novel, is an ingenious sovereign. Her sphere of influence extends only to a section of upper middle-class society in the imaginary English…

Morvern Callar - Alan Warner (1995)

1 Jan 2005

Morvern Callar. ‘Morvern’: West Highland Peninsula bounded by sea lochs; ‘Callar’: fresh, attractive. From the black and white cover of my Jonathan Cape first edition, the eponymous heroine stares back at me, her face smeared with peat, initiate of some…

Mr Alfred, M.A. - George Frie (1972)

1 Jan 2005

Allan Massie once persuasively argued that the idea of a Scottish Renaissance in the 1990s was myopically unfair to writers such as Spark, Jenkins and Linklater, who had produced bodies of extensive work throughout the post-war period. He might have…

Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell (1949)

1 Jan 2005

George Orwell wrote 1984 on the Isle of Jura, having moved there to escape the sudden, blistering fame that followed the publication of Animal Farm. This, somehow, makes it a Scottish book. No more tenuous a claim, I suppose, than lines scribbled on…

No Mean City: A Story of the Glasgow Slums - Alexander McArthur and H. Kingsley Long (1935)

1 Jan 2005

This cutting edge portrait of working-class life in the worst laid scheme in Scotland sticks out like a sore face. Rarely referred to by its subtitle or complimented for its subtlety, when it was first published Glasgow libraries refused to stock it…

One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night - Christopher Brookmyre (1999)

1 Jan 2005

Not just another news-hound turned novelist, Christopher Brookmyre, like the very best who have made the shift from fact to fiction, draws on what's best in journalism: pace, pitch and pressure. His descriptions are concise and his dialogue snappy as he…

Open the Door! - Catherine Carswell (1920)

1 Jan 2005

In Alasdair Gray's Lanark, Duncan Thaw claims that 'imaginatively, Glasgow exists as a music hall song and a few bad novels. That's all we've given to the world outside. It's all we've given to ourselves.' Open the Door!, whose author is probably best…

Our Fathers - Andrew O'Hagan (1999)

1 Jan 2005

Our Fathers is a book about politics, religion, urban regeneration and decay, and identity, both personal and national. More than anything else, however, to me it is a novel about men. Andrew O'Hagan has got inside the psyche of the west of Scotland…

Paradise - AL Kennedy (2004)

1 Jan 2005

Alison Kennedy is the kind of writer who gets her contemporaries frothing at the mouth, struggling for ways to describe their admiration. Paradise is an excellent example of why, and a bruising, emotional experience. Kennedy is a master of internal…

Psychoraag - Suhayl Saadi (2004)

1 Jan 2005

'Salaam alaikum, sat sri akaal, namaste ji, good evening oan this hoat, hoat summer's night. Fae the peaks ae Kirkintilloch tae the dips ae Cambuslang, fae the invisible mines ae Easterhoose tae the mudflats ae Clydebank, welcome, ivirywan, welcome…

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