Books, Fiction, David Pollock

Ian Rankin - Standing in Another Man’s Grave

Rankin's Rebus resurrection is a welcome return

The surprise comeback that everybody expected has finally arrived with the return of John Rebus, the fictional detective most associated with both Ian Rankin and the city of Edinburgh. Five years on from his retirement in 2007’s Exit Music, Rebus is…

Stuart MacBride - Birthdays for the Dead

The tartan noir author diverges from the Logan McRae series with a compelling and brutal thriller

(HarperCollins) A standalone diversion from his Logan McRae series of novels, Stuart MacBride once again demonstrates how he puts the grit into the Granite City. That said, Birthdays for the Dead isn’t set in Aberdeen, instead the action shifts to…

Emma Donoghue - The Sealed Letter

Re-issue of a slow-burning Victorian-set drama by the Booker-shortlisted author

(Picador) ‘No corsets, no crinoline’ is the unladylike lot of one who takes up the cause of women’s rights amidst the bustling, vital Victoriana of this reissued 2008 novel from Room author Emma Donoghue. Emily ‘Fido’ Faithfull has matured into just…

Darren Shan, Barry Hutchison and Alexander Gordon Smith talk horror

Creating terrifying tales for teenage readers at the EIBF

As far as groundings in the horror business go, young adult writer Barry Hutchison knew exactly what fear was from an early age. ‘I lived in a perpetual state of terror when I was a kid,’ says the Fort William-based creator of the Invisible Fiends…

Mari Strachan - Blow on a Dead Man’s Embers

Historical between-the-wars family drama with an eye for detail

(Canongate) Life, thinks Non Davies, a rural housewife in the mid-Wales of 1920, is like a tablecloth: ‘smooth and rough, worn thin so that it is almost a hole in places.’ It’s a prosaic description from a woman who presents a similarly functional…

Owen Sheers

Covering the poetic landscape of Britain

One of those infuriating people whose expansive CV (poet, novelist, playwright, actor, television presenter) is matched only by their down to earth charm, Wales’ Owen Sheers will be presenting two very different projects at the Book Festival. The first…

Beatrice Colin - The Songwriter

(John Murray) One of the more promising new writers in Scotland returns with a fourth novel which sets its sights far from her home country. In the same manner as Glasgow-based Beatrice Colin’s last book The Luminous Life of Lilly Aphrodite explored…

Sue Townsend - Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years

(Michael Joseph) Reneging on her statement that 2004’s Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction would be the final Mole book, Sue Townsend has returned to her most enduring creation in his 39th (and a quarter) year. That he’s back at all is…

Mathias Malzieu - The Boy with the Cuckoo-Clock Heart

Perhaps the most fantastical thing about this book is its depiction of an Edinburgh where a tumble-down old house owned by a woman who births the children of prostitutes and unfaithful women sits at the top of Arthur’s Seat. In any event, it’s the…

Peter Wild (Ed): Paint a Vulgar Picture: Fiction Inspired by The Smiths

These short story collections of Peter Wild’s are certainly well designed for grabbing fans’ imaginations. He gets a fistful of contemporary writers to extrapolate from the songs of a particularly iconic band with The Fall and Sonic Youth having…

Benjamin Obler - Javascotia

It may be hard to recall now, but there was a time when coffee shops weren’t over-running the world, and certainly hadn’t even gained a foothold in Scotland. When Benjamin Obler travelled from his native Minnesota in 1994 to study Scottish Literature on…

David Moody - Hater

(Orion) HORROR TALE The real story here isn’t one of hate, but of hard work and good fortune. Specifically, that of David Moody himself, the Halesowen author who has been self-publishing online and through print-on-demand for the best part of a…

Alan Grant, John Wagner and Massimo Belardinelli & Ian Gibson - Ace Trucking Co. Vol.1

Born out of the 70s and 80s-mired misapprehension that CB radio talk was the vernacular of the future (let’s blame Burt Reynolds for that), this weekly 2000AD serial nevertheless became one of the British comic’s best for a while. That’s partly down to…

John Updike - The Widows of Eastwick

For almost half a century, novelist, poet and New Yorker writer John Updike has chronicled the concerns, thoughts and sexual foibles of the American middle class. Not always successfully though, as can be forgiven amidst a career which embraces almost…

Captain America: The Chosen No 1

David Morrell & Mitch Breitweiser

In the current Marvel universe, Captain America is dead. Still, that doesn’t stop him being reincarnated when David Morrell – the novelist who created Rambo – comes calling for a scripting job. The majority of this first issue of six is about as…