Sign in | Register | Email newsletters
Location: set your location
Sorted by date / most viewed.
8 May 2008
FAMILY DRAMA (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) The Lighted Rooms takes on a vast array of human experience from Boer War concentration camps and townships of modern-day Bloemfontein to commodities trading crises and antiseptic nursing homes in 21st century…
1 Nov 2007
Umberto Eco likes to think of himself as disagreeable. Being described as such, he says, ‘fills me with pride and virtuous satisfaction.’ To this end, he exhorts readers to, among other things, insult the dead, ritually sacrifice presidents, choose…
23 Aug 2007
In the space of 24 hours, Ann Patchett’s Run covers an entire social spectrum: interracial relationships, Catholicism and its validity, familial conflict, economic and class equality, and political ethics. This is a hefty fallout from a single event for…
16 Aug 2007
‘Sitting at a desk talking to myself’ is how poet, novelist, playwright and journalist Owen Sheers defines writing. It seems his desk has served him well. His latest work is a radio play about WWII poet Alun Lewis; and a collaboration with composer…
Lavinia Greenlaw’s latest book, The Importance of Music to Girls, is a memoir recalling her girlhood rendered through music. Beginning with her first musical memory of waltzing on her father’s feet, it meanders through the musicals and recorder practice…
WAR DRAMA Tokyo Year Zero is unrelentingly miserable. A revolving recurrence of the same events, punctuated by endlessly repeated fragments of the narrator’s stream of consciousness, hammering, scratching and ticking, it is also, at least in parts…
9 Aug 2007
Panos Karnezis left a Sheffield engineering job for writing, looking for a new hobby. With a critically acclaimed short story collection and Whitbread-nominated novel, he has clearly surpassed the status of enthusiastic amateur. Poetic and arresting…
19 Jul 2007
Impoverished student, witness to the Nigerian civil war, paint shop employee, poetry editor for West Africa magazine, and BBC broadcaster, Ben Okri is now a much-lauded writer. Five years in the writing, his latest novel Starbook is a tale of slavery in…
18 Jun 2007
MILITARY HISTORY This is a horrible book and an astounding read, covering the inventor of the AK47, General Mikhail Kalashnikov, Sudanese child soldiers, American rappers and Islamic terrorists. Michael Hodges recounts its shifting cultural…
21 May 2007
WAR DRAMA September 1944. The women of a remote valley in Wales wake to find their husbands have disappeared in the night with neither explanation nor warning. Within weeks, a German patrol moves into the valley on some unstated mission, their…
23 Apr 2007
SOCIAL DRAMA Los Angeles, California. Black is a busy man. By day he collects racist and sexist jokes from toilets for his mural (one from Buckingham Palace via Sharon Osbourne), while being stalked by Archangel Gabriel, and obsessing over…
12 Mar 2007
POETRY COLLECTION Every so often, a collection of poems comes along which warrants closing the door, leaving emails unopened and the phone unanswered to read it from cover to cover. A Book of Lives is one such publication. As Scotland’s Makar, it’s…
26 Feb 2007
RELIGIOUS DRAMA Originally printed on a photocopier and distributed from the back of Michael Muhammad Knight’s car in mosque parking lots, The Taqwacores charts the attempts by Yusef, a punk and convert to Islam at 16, to live entirely by Muslim…
12 Feb 2007
MONOLOGUES The word ‘monologue’ conjures up two possibilities. The first is a droning, nondescript, shadowed face. The other is some heavily made-up and overly dramatic individual, unconcerned with masking anything, and most likely shouting. Taken…
28 Sep 2006
MYTHICAL DRAMA The latest in the Canongate myths series, Dream Angus is about the Celtic god of dreams, youth, beauty, and love. Despite being stolen from his gentle water spirit mother by his overbearing, philandering father and palmed off on his…
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…
16 articles.
Receive your 12 month subscription to The List + List Card + Eating and Drinking Guide for just £40 (saving £30.95)
The best of Glasgow and Edinburgh:Best BreakfastsClassic CoffeeTop Hot ChocolateHot BBQ Spots
Get a whole year's worth of issues for just £30, plus a £10 voucher to spend at your favourite wagamama!
Celebrity authors signing copies of their latest books.
The latest reviews and trailers. Show times near you tonight, tomorrow and this weekend.
Celebrate the diversity of Scottish literary culture, taking in the obvious and obscure from across four centuries.