100 Best Scottish Books

John Galt - Annals of the Parish (1821)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

John Galt was born in Irvine, made his name in London, money in Canada, and died and was buried in Greenock in 1839. He was Coleridge’s favourite novelist and a star contributor to Blackwood’s Magazine. In the 1820s, he wrote a series of Scots stories…

Aonghas Pàdraig Caimbeul - An Oidhche Mus Do Sheòl Sinn (2003)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

The title of Aonghas Pàdraig’s first full-length novel means ‘The Night Before We Sailed’. Few novels have been published in Scottish Gaelic and many of those that have are aimed at children and school pupils. This makes the author’s achievement in this…

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

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

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…

Ian Rankin - Black and Blue (1997)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

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…

Laura Hird - Born Free (1999)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

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…

Tom Nairn - The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (1977)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Twenty-five years after Thatcherism and the Falklands, New Labour and Iraq, who can now dispute that the British state is a strange, untamed beast, unreformed, still not fully at ease in the modern age, and shaped by memory of empire and imperial…

Frederic Lindsay - Brond (1984)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

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…

Naomi Mitchison - The Bull Calves (1947)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Naomi Mitchison is one of Scotland’s most prolific and impressive 20th century writers, although her work has not received the attention it deserves. She wrote The Bull Calves during World War II which she spent mainly at Carradale House in Kintyre and…

Anne Donovan - Buddha Da (2003)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

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…

Matthew Fitt - But n Ben A-Go-Go (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…

Patrick MacGill - Children of the Dead End (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…

AJ Cronin -The Citadel (1937)

1 Jan 2005

In recent years, Jed Mercurio’s novel Bodies and its subsequent television adaptation have provided shocking insight into the mental and physical strain suffered by overworked medical staff, including consequent fatal lapses in judgement. Rewind some 70…

Frank Kuppner - A Concussed History of Scotland (1990)

1 Jan 2005

The kind of exercise in post-modernity that makes traditionalists drop their monocles in disbelief at the self-indulgence of it all, A Concussed History of Scotland earned Kuppner huge critical acclaim but, perhaps understandably, didn’t trouble any…

Robin Jenkins - The Cone-Gatherers (1955)

1 Jan 2005

In what circumstances is kleptomania acceptable; almost certainly when a nation’s culture is at stake? It hardly rates as the crime of the century but I once stole a conifer from the floor of the Tramway, after a memorable production of Communicado’s…

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

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

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…

Iain Crichton Smith - Consider the Lilies (1968)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

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…

R. M. Ballantyne - The Coral Island (1858)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Reading The Coral Island after a 40-year gap, I found I knew whole passages almost by heart. Had I read it that often? Ballantyne's stories, which began with his own adventures as an employee of the Hudson's Bay Company, successfully nourished…

Louise Welsh - The Cutting Room (2002)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

A host of successful new authors has sprung from Glasgow University’s highly productive creative writing course over the last few years, with Louise Welsh at the front of the pack. The Cutting Room was Welsh’s 2002 debut novel and it is a book that has…

Robert Alan Jamieson - A Day at the Office (1991)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

‘We should be free to wander,’ says the unnamed narrator early on. And that’s exactly what the author goes on to do. Pity the poor typesetter: each page of this book – a precursor to much modern experimental Scottish fiction – looks more like a work of…

Archie Hind - The Dear Green Place (1966)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

There are two kinds of books in this list: great fiction by people who happen to come from Scotland, and great fiction influenced by and composed with Scotland in mind. The Dear Green Place is perhaps the best example of the latter. From renditions of…

James Kelman - A Disaffection (1989)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

How Late it Was, How Late may have grabbed the headlines, The Busconductor Hines may have been more seminal, but it is A Disaffection, quietly, which is James Kelman’s best book. Its ‘hero’ (a problematic term; it’s James Kelman we’re talking about) is…

RD Laing - The Divided Self (1960)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Cometh the hour cometh the book. I had a bit of a Jungian experience with The Divided Self. I'd been working on a play in which the main character is schizophrenic and was trawling my bookcases for drama as I like to read a lot of plays when I'm…

William McIlvanney - Docherty (1975)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

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…

David Hume - An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Only three years after the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie's troops at Culloden, a book was published that shattered the world of philosophy and paved the way for the Scottish Enlightenment. David Hume, then aged 37, recast the opening parts of his…

Andrew Greig - Electric Brae (1997)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Throughout the 1990s, when the majority of the emerging Scottish novelists seemed fixated with gritty urban realism, a handful of authors were taking their inspiration from the dramatic landscape of the country's remoter climes. Notable among these was…

Tobias Smollett - The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Tobias Smollett's last and best novel is misleadingly named. Clinker - a comically over-enthusiastic Scottish manservant - does not appear until a third of the way through the book, and is often conspicuous by his absence. Instead, the central figure is…

Violet Jacob - Flemington (1911)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Flemington is a finely wrought historical adventure written by a poet. It belongs to a Scottish tradition reaching from Scott through Stevenson and John Buchan, who described Flemington as 'the best Scots romantic novel since The Master of Ballantrae'.

Agnes Owens - For the Love of Willie (1998)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

It is often remarked that Scottish scribes have a particular proclivity for mining the dark and devilish in their fiction. Agnes Owens' For the Love of Willie displays all the pitch-black humour and acute observation that have characterised her work…

Ian Fleming - From Russia, With Love (1957)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

'My name is Bond, James Bond.' There are few characters of the 20th century that can boast the kind of global renown of Ian Fleming's British secret agent. Widely regarded as the best of Fleming's novels (JFK rated it among his top ten favourite books…

Dorothy Dunnett - The Game of Kings (1961)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Dorothy Dunnett started writing books having complained to her husband that she had run out of things to read. Her debut, The Game of Kings, appeared at the end of 18 months fuelled by the extensive research that would characterise all of her historical…

Denise Mina - Garnethill (1998)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

There was a time when the Glasgow-set detective story meant little more than the adventures of one craggy-faced chief inspector, handy with his fists, the originator of that oft-recited catchphrase: 'There's been a murrrder … ' From the late 90s…

James Frazer - The Golden Bough (1890)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Though largely debunked as anthropology, the legacy of James Frazer's The Golden Bough remains incalculable. Tracing humanity's belief in magic through religion to scientific rationality, across a staggering array of ancient and developing cultures…

Nancy Brysson Morrison - The Gowk Storm (1933)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

The Gowk Storm is the story of three close-knit sisters, the daughters of a minister, living in a remote parish on the fringes of the Highlands. Narrated by Lisbet, the youngest sister, the novel is written mainly in English, but given a strong sense of…

Bernard MacLaverty - Grace Notes (1997)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Writing outside the gender barrier is a tough business. There's always the risk that the relationship between author and subject strays too close to that of puppeteer and marionette. To attempt this creative leap demonstrates a writer's confidence in…

George Mackay Brown - Greenvoe (1972)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Transposing the Orcadian rhythms of his critically-acclaimed poetry to a prose work which focuses on the dissipation of an island community proved a masterstroke for George Mackay Brown. In the absence of any real plot, we find ourselves embroiled in…

Alistair MacLean - The Guns of Navarone (1957)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

It will doubtless surprise many to find this most pulp of World War II action-adventures included in a compendium of Scotland's most accomplished fiction. But cast out Gregory Peck and J Lee Thompson's plodding, waterlogged film adaptation from your…

J.K. Rowling - Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Before the Empire - the midnight queues round the block, the merchandise, the films and 800-page sequels - there was The Philosopher's Stone. It's easy to forget just what a phenomenon it is, and why. The story begins with Hagrid taking an 11-year-old…

Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness (1902)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

In the heyday of British Imperialism, Blackwood's Magazine in Edinburgh published a great number of stories of life and adventures in various colonial outposts. Much of this dated very quickly and is of only minor historical interest today. A novel…

John Prebble - The Highland Clearances (1963)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Although born in Middlesex, John Prebble grew up in Sutherland, a town in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. It was amongst the descendants of Scottish emigrants - offspring of the crofters who had been forced to leave the Highlands by landlords…

Ali Smith - Hotel World (2001)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

‘Woooooooohooooooo what a fall what a soar what a plummet what a dash into dark into light …’ So opens Hotel World, as Sara Wilby’s ghost remembers her body plunging to its death down a lift shaft in a branch of the Global Hotel chain. Right away we…

Arthur Conan Doyle - The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

‘Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!’ I have read my copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles so many times that the pages have gone soft with much turning, but Dr Mortimer’s words to Holmes never fail to thrill me. This is where…

George Douglas Brown - The House with the Green Shutters (1901)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Oh God, what was I thinking? Why did I sign up to review a book that has a boring title, is more than 100 years old, was a one-hit wonder, and is beloved of crusty old academics who boff on about its model of classical Greek tragedy? It’s got to be…

Willa Muir - Imagined Corners (1931)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Willa Muir may be one of the lesser known names on this list, but that's due more to her date of birth (and perhaps her husband's name) than her undoubted talent. One of Scotland's foremost feminists, a brilliant, experimental psychology student and…

Luke Sutherland - Jelly Roll (1998)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

The manner of his prose has been compared to Keith Richards' way with a riff. However, one suspects Luke Sutherland would probably prefer a nod to Charlie Watts, the author's penchant being for the style and swing of jazz over the swagger and savagery…

Chaim Bermant - Jericho Sleep Alone (1964)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Part Bildungsroman, part hymn to the city of Glasgow, Jericho Sleep Alone is without a doubt the finest book written about the Scots-Jewish experience. From Bar Mitzvah to an unfulfilling teaching career, Jericho Eli Broock finds himself a perennial…

James Robertson - Joseph Knight (2003)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Scots writers often mine the country's tumultuous history to make sense of contemporary concerns. With his bestselling debut novel The Fanatic, James Robertson became immediately established as a creator of gripping and innovative historical fiction…

Various - King James Bible: Authorised Version (1611)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

It was the only memorable and enduring thing that came out of the Hampton Court Conference of 1604, which was called to consider the demands of the Puritans for the reform of the Church of England. King James I or VI, depending on which side of the…

Alasdair Gray - Lanark (1981)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Alasdair Gray’s Lanark is one of the finest novels written in English. Its unique blend of realism and wild surrealism was greeted with great acclaim when it was first published, especially abroad. In France, for example, it sold out within four weeks…

Ronald Frame - The Lantern Bearers (1999)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Until five years ago, had you scanned the Scottish Fiction section of any popular bookseller, chances are your eyes wouldn't have alighted on any work by Ronald Frame. Despite having published 13 books as well as groundbreaking plays and screenplays…

James Boswell - The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

It may seem a strange thing to rate an author who begins his masterpiece with a famous demurral of his own country (‘I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it’) as one of Scotland’s greatest writers. But still, there it is; James Boswell’s…