100 Best Scottish Books

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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…

William Laughton Lorimer (trans.) - The New Testament in Scots (1983)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

When the Scots Reformers adopted an English translation of the Bible, a serious blow was dealt to the status of the Scots language which was increasingly banished from the realms of learning and official culture it had occupied since the Middle Ages.

George Orwell - Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

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…

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

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

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…

Alexander McCall Smith - The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (1998)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Some years ago Mma 'Precious' Ramotswe decided to use her inheritance from her beloved father to open a detective agency in Botswana. Having been met with scepticism by her bank manager ('Can women be detectives?'), she put together her assets (a tiny…

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

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

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…

Catherine Carswell - Open the Door! (1920)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

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…

Andrew O'Hagan - Our Fathers (1999)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

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…

A.L. Kennedy - Paradise (2004)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

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…

Muriel Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Jean Brodie is one of the most complex characters in modern literature. As a teacher, she is passionate about her pupils, even if her methods are frowned upon by the authorities. This makes her a rebel, and we should love her for that. But her influence…

James Hogg - The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is one of cinema’s Holy Grails. Plans, scripts, outlines and pitches lie in archives, collections and bottom drawers from Holyrood to Hollywood. Hardly a writer who knows the book – myself…

Suhayl Saadi - Psychoraag (2004)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

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…

Nan Shepherd - The Quarry Wood (1928)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Nan Shepherd spent most of her life teaching English in Aberdeen, walking her beloved hills and mountains and encouraging other writers. Yet she will be remembered for the three works of prose fiction she wrote in a five-year burst of creativity in her…

Walter Scott - Rob Roy (1818)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

The legacy of Walter Scott has done much for tourism in Scotland. Not only does the monument erected in his memory dominate Edinburgh's Princes Street, but his depiction of the Jacobite outlaw Robert MacGregor brought extra recognition to the stunning…

Thomas Carlyle - Sartor Resartus (1836)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

It's always especially interesting to look at texts from a period during which writing was in flux. The years between 1820 and 1840 were tumultuous ones for literature, with a sharp contraction in the production of poetry (caused, in part, by an…

Toni Davidson - Scar Culture (1999)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

A challenging and at times deeply disturbing read, Scar Culture is a British One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and a dark, twisted spellbinder of a novel. Concentrating on the case studies of three abused children, you become privy to some of the most…

Margaret Elphinstone - The Sea Road (2000)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Historical novels are not easy to get right. If they are under-researched, they don't ring true. If they are over-researched, they groan under a burden of detail that the author was delighted to discover but which may have no place in the story, or was…

Jimmy Boyle - A Sense of Freedom (1977)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

This is one of the most important books ever published about crime and punishment in Britain. A Sense of Freedom is the autobiographical account of how a boy from the Gorbals grew up in the gang culture of the 60s to become 'Scotland's Most Violent…

George Blake - The Shipbuilders (1935)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Much as shipbuilding was the industry upon which Glasgow was built, so The Shipbuilders is one of the twin pillars upon which its literary heritage is constructed. Published in 1935 - the same year as McArthur and Long's No Mean City it gives a humane…

Gordon Williams - The Siege of Trencher's Farm (1969)

1 Jan 2005

The Siege of Trencher's Farm achieved notoriety when it was adapted and released as the nasty, brutish Straw Dogs by Sam Peckinpah. The British Board of Film Censors subsequently banned the movie until 2002 because of its graphic violence and a…

Neil M Gunn - The Silver Darlings (1941)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Like Neil Miller Gunn, I’m the seventh of nine children. I know what it means to be caught between the Broons and the Waltons, part Bairn, part John Boy. Growing up, I knew Gunn was a founding figure in the Scottish Renaissance, but the only books of…

Ron Butlin - The Sound of My Voice (1987)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

After writing favourably reviewed yet largely unnoticed novels and poetry for the best part of three decades, 55-year-old Ron Butlin has the power of Irvine Welsh's popularity muscle to thank for his recently acquired and rightful status as one of…

Robert Louis Stevenson - The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

It’s the book everybody thinks they know, but may never have actually read, the iconic Scottish story. One man downs his own slightly unconvincing chemical experiment and becomes two: the good guy and the bad guy. As the bad guy, he wallows in vices and…

Jeff Torrington - Swing Hammer Swing! (1992)

1 Jan 2005

A confession: it took me what I now regard as a wastefully long time to get around to reading Swing Hammer Swing!; wastefully because I would probably have managed to read what became my favourite Scottish novel several more times had I not been so…

Lewis Grassic Gibbon - Sunset Song (1932)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

I read Sunset Song first when I was 16 at Inverness High School. I picked it up grudgingly because it looked like a girls’ book, like we were being made to read a soppy classic; it had a line-drawing of a windswept girl on the front which had put me off…

John Buchan - The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

'He told me some queer things that explained a lot that had puzzled me; things that happened in the Balkan War, how one state suddenly came out on top, why alliances were made and broken, why certain men disappeared, and where the sinews of war came…

Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse (1927)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Virginia Woolf is not a name immediately synonymous with Scottish writing. However, her evocation of the Hebrides as a place in which 'the sea is stretched like silk across the bay' should not be denied a position on the list. Conceived at the height of…

Irvine Welsh - Trainspotting (1993)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Much imitated but never bettered, Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting is my personal numero uno 20th century Scottish book. This novel is now so embedded in Scottish culture that it’s hard to remember it’s only been around for 11 years. In that time, it’s…

Janice Galloway - The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1989)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Janice Galloway’s debut novel made a considerable impact upon its publication. Winner of the MIND Book of the Year/Allen Lane Award, American Academy EM Forster Award plus a SAC book award, the novel was also shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel…

Jackie Kay - Trumpet (1998)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

Scotland’s writers are a cheeky lot when it comes to sampling. Irvine Welsh and Alan Warner couldn’t move for E’d-up Face scribes wielding references to acid house. The lilting tones of folk balladry drape the narrative voice of Sunset Song. My own…

Christopher Rush - A Twelvemonth and a Day (1985)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

A Twelvemonth and a Day is a love song and lament for the vanished 'slow old tuneful times' of life in the fishing villages in the East Neuk of Fife. Rush was born in St Monans, one of the many fishing communities condemned by factory farming methods.

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)

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…

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)

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)

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…

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)

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)

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)

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)

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…