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100 Best Scottish Books

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Bella Bathurst - The Lighthouse Stevensons (1999)

Bella Bathurst - The Lighthouse Stevensons (1999)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

This is one of the more recent books to make the list, and time will show that it is definitely deserving of its place. In terms of cataloguing Scottish history, few books have better captured a moment and set in stone an incredibly important part of…

George MacDonald - Lilith (1895)

George MacDonald - Lilith (1895)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

George MacDonald has good claim to be the originator of fantasy as a genre with CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Philip Pullman and JK Rowling among many others who owe a debt to the Aberdeenshire minister turned fantasist. Lilith is the first text to employ the…

John Burnside - Living Nowhere (2003)

John Burnside - Living Nowhere (2003)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Living Nowhere amply confirms John Burnside as one of the greatest writers of prose working today. Born in West Fife, he grew up in Cowdenbeath, before leaving for Corby, an industrial centre in the English Midlands, where his father worked in the steel…

Anne Fine - Madame Doubtfire (1987)

Anne Fine - Madame Doubtfire (1987)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Three children, a stressed mum, a depressed dad, two hamsters and a quail. It's not happy families. Anne Fine's seminal text on divorce has the lightness of touch and grip of gravity that marks this multi-award winner as one of the finest children's…

Alan Spence - The Magic Flute (1990)

Alan Spence - The Magic Flute (1990)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

For over 25 years, Alan Spence's uncanny talent for cosmically transforming the seemingly everyday in city life has been showcased in poetry, drama, short stories and novels. In just three deceptively simple lines in the poem 'ah', Spence perfectly…

Des Dillon - Me and Ma Gal (1995)

Des Dillon - Me and Ma Gal (1995)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Me and Ma Gal is a novel which continues to defy the odds. Published by a small Scottish press in the mid-90s, re-published by a large London firm in 2001, Me and Ma Gal twice failed to make Des Dillon as trendy as Irvine Welsh or as fêted by critics as…

Margaret Oliphant - Miss Marjoribanks (1866)

Margaret Oliphant - Miss Marjoribanks (1866)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

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…

Alan Warner - Morvern Callar (1995)

Alan Warner - Morvern Callar (1995)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

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…

George Friel - Mr Alfred, MA (1972)

George Friel - Mr Alfred, MA (1972)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

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…

Neil Munro - The New Road (1914)

Neil Munro - The New Road (1914)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

The image of writers struggling unrecognised in their own lifetime only to be canonised long after their remains have been consigned to paupers' graves is a familiar one. Perhaps we should pity poor Neil Munro (born 1863) whose literary career took the…

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