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100 Best Scottish Books

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The Sound of My Voice - Ron Butlin (1987)

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…

A Sense of Freedom - Jimmy Boyle (1977)

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…

The Siege of Trencher's Farm - Gordon Williams (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…

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…

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

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…

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

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…

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…

Madame Doubtfire - Anne Fine (1987)

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…

Sunset Song - Lewis Grassic Gibbon (1932)

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…

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

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…

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…

The Golden Bough - James Frazer (1890)

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…

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

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…

The Thirty-Nine Steps - John Buchan (1915)

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…

Under the Skin - Michel Faber (2000)

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…

Whisky Galore - Compton Mackenzie (1947)

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…

A Disaffection - James Kelman (1989)

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…

A Twelvemonth and a Day - Christopher Rush (1985)

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.

Lanark - Alasdair Gray (1981)

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…

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

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…

The Guns of Navarone - Alistair MacLean (1957)

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…

The Wealth of Nations - Adam Smith (1776)

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…

The White Bird Passes - Jessie Kesson (1958)

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…

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…

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