100 Best Scottish Books

Sorted by date / most viewed. Showing 25, 50, 100 per page.

RSS feedWhat is this?

A Concussed History of Scotland - Frank Kuppner (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…

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…

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 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…

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.

A Voyage to Arcturus - David Lindsay (1920)

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…

Adam Blair - John Gibson Lockhart (1822)

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…

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding - David Hume (1748)

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…

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…

Annals of the Parish - John Galt (1821)

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…

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…

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…

Brond - Frederic Lindsay (1984)

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…

Buddha Da - Anne Donovan (2003)

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…

But n Ben A-Go-Go - Matthew Fitt (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…

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…

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater - Thomas De Quincey (1822)

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…

Consider the Lilies - Iain Crichton Smith (1968)

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…

Docherty - William McIlvanney (1975)

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…

Electric Brae - Andrew Greig (1997)

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…

Flemington - Violet Jacob (1911)

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'.

For the Love of Willie - Agnes Owens (1998)

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…

From Russia, With Love - Ian Fleming (1957)

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…

Garnethill - Denise Mina (1998)

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…

Grace Notes - Bernard MacLaverty (1997)

1 Jan 2005

Writing outside the gender barrier is a tough business. There's always the risk that the relationship between author and subject strays too close to that of puppeteer and marionette. To attempt this creative leap demonstrates a writer's confidence in…

Greenvoe - George Mackay Brown (1972)

1 Jan 2005

Transposing the Orcadian rhythms of his critically-acclaimed poetry to a prose work which focuses on the dissipation of an island community proved a masterstroke for George Mackay Brown. In the absence of any real plot, we find ourselves embroiled in…

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone - J.K. Rowling (1997)

1 Jan 2005

Before the Empire - the midnight queues round the block, the merchandise, the films and 800-page sequels - there was The Philosopher's Stone. It's easy to forget just what a phenomenon it is, and why. The story begins with Hagrid taking an 11-year-old…

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (1902)

1 Jan 2005

In the heyday of British Imperialism, Blackwood's Magazine in Edinburgh published a great number of stories of life and adventures in various colonial outposts. Much of this dated very quickly and is of only minor historical interest today. A novel…

Hotel World - Ali Smith (2001)

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…

Imagined Corners - Willa Muir (1931)

1 Jan 2005

Willa Muir may be one of the lesser known names on this list, but that's due more to her date of birth (and perhaps her husband's name) than her undoubted talent. One of Scotland's foremost feminists, a brilliant, experimental psychology student and…

Jelly Roll - Luke Sutherland (1998)

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…

Jericho Sleep Alone - Chaim Bermant (1964)

1 Jan 2005

Part Bildungsroman, part hymn to the city of Glasgow, Jericho Sleep Alone is without a doubt the finest book written about the Scots-Jewish experience. From Bar Mitzvah to an unfulfilling teaching cDocherty William McIlvanney (1975) Docherty is the most…

Joseph Knight - James Robertson (2003)

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…

King James Bible: Authorised Version - Various (1611)

1 Jan 2005

It was the only memorable and enduring thing that came out of the Hampton Court Conference of 1604, which was called to consider the demands of the Puritans for the reform of the Church of England. King James I or VI, depending on which side of the…

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…

Lilith - George MacDonald (1895)

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…

Living Nowhere - John Burnside (2003)

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…

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…

Me and Ma Gal - Des Dillon (1995)

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…

Miss Marjoribanks - Margaret Oliphant (1866)

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…

Morvern Callar - Alan Warner (1995)

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…

Mr Alfred, M.A. - George Frie (1972)

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…

Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell (1949)

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…

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…

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

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…

Open the Door! - Catherine Carswell (1920)

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…

Our Fathers - Andrew O'Hagan (1999)

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…

Paradise - AL Kennedy (2004)

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…

Psychoraag - Suhayl Saadi (2004)

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…

Rob Roy - Walter Scott (1818)

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…

Sartor Resartus - Thomas Carlyle (1836)

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…

Scar Culture - Toni Davidson (1999)

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…

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…

Swing Hammer Swing! - Jeff Torrington (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…

The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism - Tom Nairn (1977)

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…

The Bull Calves - Naomi Mitchison (1947)

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…

The Citadel - AJ Cronin (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…

The Cone-Gatherers - Robin Jenkins (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…

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 Cutting Room - Louise Welsh (2002)

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…

The Dear Green Place - Archie Hind (1966)

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…

The Divided Self - RD Laing (1960)

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…

The Expedition of Humphry Clinker - Tobias Smollett (1771)

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…

The Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett (1961)

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…

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 Gowk Storm - Nancy Brysson Morrison (1933)

1 Jan 2005

The Gowk Storm is the story of three close-knit sisters, the daughters of a minister, living in a remote parish on the fringes of the Highlands. Narrated by Lisbet, the youngest sister, the novel is written mainly in English, but given a strong sense of…

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 Highland Clearances - John Prebble (1969)

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…

The Hound of the Baskervilles - Arthur Conan Doyle (1902)

1 Jan 2005

‘Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!’ I have read my copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles so many times that the pages have gone soft with much turning, but Dr Mortimer’s words to Holmes never fail to thrill me. This is where…

The House with the Green Shutters - George Douglas Brown (1901)

1 Jan 2005

Oh God, what was I thinking? Why did I sign up to review a book that has a boring title, is more than 100 years old, was a one-hit wonder, and is beloved of crusty old academics who boff on about its model of classical Greek tragedy? It’s got to be…

The Lantern Bearers - Ronald Frame (1999)

1 Jan 2005

Until five years ago, had you scanned the Scottish Fiction section of any popular bookseller, chances are your eyes wouldn't have alighted on any work by Ronald Frame. Despite having published 13 books as well as groundbreaking plays and screenplays…

The Life of Samuel Johnson - James Boswell (1791)

1 Jan 2005

It may seem a strange thing to rate an author who begins his masterpiece with a famous demurral of his own country (‘I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it’) as one of Scotland’s greatest writers. But still, there it is; James Boswell’s…

The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst (1999)

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…

The Magic Flute - Alan Spence (1990)

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…

The New Road - Neil Munro (1914)

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…

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

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.

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

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…

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

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…

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

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…

The Quarry Wood - Nan Shepherd (1928)

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…

The Sea Road - Margaret Elphinstone (2000)

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…

The Shipbuilders - George Blake (1935)

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…

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…

The Silver Darlings - Neil M Gunn (1941)

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…

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…

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…

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…

The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks (1984)

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…

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…

The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (1908)

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…

To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf (1927)

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…

Trainspotting - Irvine Welsh (1993)

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…

Trumpet - Jackie Kay (1998)

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…

Tunes of Glory - James Kennaway (1956)

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…

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…

Young Adam - Alexander Trocchi (1954)

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…

Found 100 articles.

Sorted by date / most viewed. Showing 25, 50, 100 per page.