Scottish Interest - Winter 2024/25
Here are our Scottish interest picks for autumn/winter 2024! Have a browse through to help focus your gift buying for this season, and beyond!
Close Knit (Jenny Colgan)
Everyone knows her life story. But who will win her heart? Gertie has always had her head in the clouds, wondering what her life might be like if she could only pluck up the courage to leave the remote Scottish island where she was born. It's the only place she knows, but you can't do anything there without everyone knowing - the glue of this close-knit community is the Knitting Circle, a group of strong, capable and frankly nosy women who work hard, gossip, knit and support each other through thick and thin.
At the centre of this sisterhood is Gertie's mum Jean and her grandmother Elspeth, and the three generations of women live together, surrounded by wool, in one small cottage. When the chance comes to make changes - a new job working with old schoolfriend Morag on the local airline, new friends and even a possible new romance - a world of possibilities opens up before Gertie. Is this the way to make her dreams come true?
The Specimens (Mairi Kidd)
Edinburgh, 1828. Two women - one rich, one poor - must navigate life against a frenzied backdrop of medical discovery, mob mayhem, and murder.
The home Helen shares in the slums of the Old Town with her lover William Burke could hardly be more different from Susan's dreams of an affluent existence as the wife of Robert Knox, one of the foremost anatomists of the day. But as people begin disappearing, these two very different women face an impossible choice. Should they protect what lives they have or tell the truth about what they know?This is the story of the notorious serial killings of Burke and Hare, told for the first time through the eyes of two very different women, whose stories explore the depths of the human heart in a perilous, vulnerable world.
Lady's Rock (Sue Lawrence)
Highland Scotland was no place for a woman in the early 1500s. Life was turbulent, brutal, short.
Chiefs waged war, while their sisters and daughters were traded as pawns in marriage. Catherine Campbell was one such young bride, betrothed to Lachlan Maclean and despatched from her fine home to join him on the Isle of Mull, to bear his sons and heirs. But Lachlan proved to be nothing like the man of Catherine’s dreams, and she was forced to resign herself to enduring life with him for the sake of duty… Until the day when he threatened to take away the one thing she couldn’t sacrifice: her daughter.
Casting a fascinating light on the ruthless clan system, this compelling drama by one of Scotland’s best-loved novelists explores love, ambition, betrayal and revenge and highlights the precarious position of 16th-century women.
Broken Ghosts (James "J. D." Oswald)
Spring, 1985. Twelve year old Phoebe MacDonald's world is falling apart. She has just buried her parents, a fire at their family home claiming both in a freak accident.
Now she must leave Scotland, the only place she has ever known, and go to live with her uncle Louis and aunt Maude in their home in the Welsh woods. As spring turns to summer, Phoebe falls slowly into the rhythm of life with her eccentric guardians in their curious home. But there is no one her age in the nearby village, and she is lonely until she meets a strange girl, Gwyneth, who wanders the surrounding forest barefoot and alone.
Outsiders both, the two girls form a strong bond, though nobody else seems to believe that Gwyneth is real. Phoebe knows better, and soon with her new friend's help, she begins to see the woods for what they truly are - a place of magic and wonder, where the line between life and death is blurred. Where spirits roam and secrets fester.
Something happened here, a lifetime ago. A wrong that yearns to be put right. The answer is within Phoebe's grasp, but will revealing it put her in grave danger? For the woods hold a dark truth, and some will do anything to keep it in the shadows.
Nobody's Empire (Stuart Murdoch)
Glasgow, early 1990s, and Stephen - music-loving romantic - has emerged from a hospital stay, diagnosed with ME/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, a little-understood disease. He meets fellow strugglers, for whom the world seems to care less and less, and they form their own support group as they try to navigate their lives.
Starting to write songs, albeit in a slow and fledgling way, Stephen wakes to the possibility of a spiritual and artistic life. Leaving Glasgow in search of the mythic warmth of California, he and his friend Richard float between hostels, sofas and park benches. Could the trip offer them both a new beginning?
Ootlin (Jenni Fagan)
The government told a story about me before I was born. Jenni Fagan was property of the state before birth. She drew her first breath in care and by the age of seven, she had lived in fourteen different homes and had her name changed multiple times.
Twenty years after her first attempt to write this powerful memoir, Jenni is finally ready to share her account. Ootlin is a journey through the broken UK care system – it is one of displacement and exclusion, but also of the power of storytelling. It is about the very human act of making meaning from adversity.
Never Understood: The Jesus and Mary Chain (William & Jim Reid)
For 5 years after they'd swapped sought-after apprenticeships for life on the dole, brothers William and Jim Reid sat up till the early hours in the front room of their parents' East Kilbride council house, plotting their path to world domination over endless cups of tea, with the music turned down low so as not to wake their sleeping sister. They knew they couldn't play in the same band because they'd argue too much, so they'd describe their dream ensembles to each other until finally they realised that these two perfect bands were actually the same band, and the name of that band was The Jesus and Mary Chain.
The rest was not silence, and picking up those conversations again more than 40 years later, William and Jim tell the full story of one of Britain's greatest guitar bands for the very first time - a wildly funny and improbably moving chronicle of brotherly strife, feedback, riots, drug and alcohol addiction, eternal outsiders and extreme shyness, that also somehow manages to be a love letter to the Scottish working-class family.
The Bridge Between Worlds (Gavin Francis)
In a world increasingly preoccupied by borders, bridges celebrate the possibility of connection, allowing the flow of goods, people and ideas. Bridges are among our grandest physical structures with the power of transforming lives and economies, but we also stand (or fall) upon the simple arch of bones in our feet. Text is a bridge between writer and reader, and conversation builds bridges of understanding between minds.
Dr Gavin Francis has spent his life fascinated by the power of bridges to improve human connection. In The Bridge Between Worlds he examines bridges both actual and metaphorical, on a journey through more than twenty countries, across four decades of travel. From Rome's Ponte Sant'Angelo to Brooklyn, Victoria Falls to London, Singapore to Siberia, this thought-provoking book reflects on connections between nations and between individuals.
Francis demonstrates what the building of bridges has meant to our civilisation, how crossings can enrich our lives, and the price we pay when we tear them down.
Edinburgh: A New History (Alistair Moffat)
From prehistory to the present day, the story of Edinburgh is packed with incident and drama. As Scotland’s capital since 1437, the city has witnessed many of the key events which have shaped the nation. But Edinburgh has always been much more than just a political centre.
During the Enlightenment, it was one the intellectual powerhouses of Europe, and in the twentieth century it became the arts capital of the world with the founding of its many festivals. Finance, religion, education and industry are also important parts of the story. Alistair Moffat explores these themes and many more, showing how the city has grown, changed and adapted over the centuries.
He introduces Edinburgh’s famous places and people – including monarchs, murderers, writers and philosophers – as well as the ordinary citizens who have contributed so much to the life of one of the world’s best-known and most beautiful cites