100 Best Scottish Books

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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'.

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…