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Intermediate 2

Intermediate 2

Scottish Fiction Suggestions for senior pupils Titles included in this list are either written by a Scottish author, an author residing in , a novel set in Scotland or a novel which is part of a series of which one book is set in Scotland.

ATKINSON, Kate One Good Turn Kate Atkinson creates a series of bizarre characters, all involved with murder--either planning it, committing it, or trying to avoid it. Many seemingly unrelated characters, involved in several seemingly unrelated plot lines, make their appearance in the first fifty pages. During the four days in which the novel takes place, however, these characters and plots start to overlap and eventually come together, until, at the end, the reader is smiling with pleasure at the brilliant plotting and ironic twists of fate.

ATKINSON, Kate When Will There Be Good News? In rural Devon, six-year-old Joanna Mason witnesses an appalling crime. Thirty years later the man convicted of the crime is released from prison. In , sixteen-year-old Reggie works as a nanny for a G.P. But Dr Hunter has gone missing and Reggie seems to be the only person who is worried. Across town, Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe is also looking for a missing person, unaware that hurtling towards her is an old friend -- Jackson Brodie -- himself on a journey that becomes fatally interrupted

BANKS, Iain The man who wakes up in the extraordinary world of a bridge has amnesia, and his doctor doesn't seem to want to cure him. Does it ? Exploring the bridge occupies most of his days. But at night there are his dreams. Dreams in which desperate men drive sealed carriages across barren mountains to a bizarre rendezvous; an illiterate barbarian storms an enchanted tower under a stream of verbal abuse; and broken men walk forever over bridges without end, taunted by visions of a doomed sexuality. Lying in bed unconscious after an accident wouldn't be much fun, you'd think. Oh yes? It depends who and what you've left behind. Which is the stranger reality, day or night?

BANKS, Iain Kate Telman is a senior executive officer in The Business, a powerful and massively discreet transglobal organisation. Financially transparent, internally democratic and disavowing conventional familial inheritance, the character of The Business seems, even to Kate, to be vague to the point of invisibility. It possesses, allegedly, a book of Leonardo cartoons, several sets of Crown Jewels and wants to buy its own State in order to acquire a seat at the United Nations. Kate's job is to keep abreast of current technological developments and her global reach encompasses Silicon Valley, a ranch in Nebraska, the firm's secretive Swiss headquarters, and a remote Himalayan principality. In the course of her journey Kate must peel away layers of emotional insulation and the assumptions of a lifetime. She must learn to keep her world at arm's length. To take control, she has to do The Business.

BANKS, Iain The book's central character is Hisako Onoda, a world-famous cellist. As the book opens, Hisako is en-route from Japan to Europe, where she's due to perform in a series of concerts. However, as she's terrified of flying, she's making the journey by boat. Having travelled to Honolulu on the Gassam Maru, she then boarded the Nakodo - which was due to take her to Rotterdam via the Panama Canal. Unfortunately, due to `civil unrest' in the region - armed conflict between guerrilla fighters and government forces - the canal has been closed. Fro the moment, the Nakodo and two other ships are essentially trapped on Gat�n Lake. Although they are hoping for the all-clear to continue their journey soon, the conflict I, unfortunately, coming closer.

BANKS, Iain Its two main characters are Cameron Colley, a journalist on a Scottish newspaper called The Caledonian, which resembles , and a serial murderer whose identity is a mystery. The passages dealing with the journalist are written in the first person, and those dealing with the murderer in the second person, so the novel presents, in alternate chapters, an unusual example of an unreliable narrator. The events take place mostly in and around Edinburgh.

BANKS, Iain The Crow Road is set in the fictional Argyll town of Gallanach (by its description, reminiscent of Oban but on the north east shore of Loch Crinan), the real village of Lochgair, and in where Prentice McHoan lives. Prentice's uncle Rory has disappeared eight years previous while writing a book called The Crow Road. Prentice becomes obsessed with papers his uncle left behind and sets out to solve the mystery. Along the way he must cope with estrangement from his father, unrequited love, sibling rivalry, and failure at his studies.

BANKS, Iain Daniel Weir used to be a famous - not to say infamous - rock star. Maybe still is. At thirty-one he has been both a brilliant failure and a dull success. He's made a lot of mistakes that have paid off and a lot of smart moves he'll regret forever (however long that turns out to be). Daniel Weir has gone from rags to riches and back, and managed to hold onto them both, though not much else. His friends all seem to be dead, fed up with him or just disgusted - and who can blame them? And now Daniel Weir is all alone. As he contemplates his life, Daniel realises he only has two problems: the past and the future. He knows how bad the past has been. But the future - well, the future is something else.

BANKS, Iain Feersum Endjinn The book is set on a far future Earth where the uploading of mindstates into a world-spanning computer network (known as "the data corpus", "cryptosphere" or simply "crypt") is commonplace, allowing the dead to be easily reincarnated (though by custom, only a limited number of reincarnations are allowed). Humanity has lost much of its technological background, due partly to an exodus by much of the species, and partly to the fact that those who remained (or at least their rulers) are fighting against more advanced technology such as Artificial Intelligence.

BANKS, Iain A Song Of Stone The war is ending, perhaps ended. For the castle and its occupants the troubles are just beginning. Armed gangs roam a lawless land where each farm and house supports a column of dark smoke. Taking to the roads with the other refugees, anonymous in their raggedness, seems safer than remaining in the ancient keep. However, the lieutenant of an outlaw band has other ideas and the castle becomes the focus for a dangerous game of desire, deceit and death. Iain Bank's masterly novel reveals his unique ability to combine gripping narrative with a relentlessly voyaging imagination.

BANKS, Iain The first ever collection of Iain M. Banks's short fiction, this volume includes the acclaimed novella, 'The State of the Art'.

BANKS, Iain Graham Park is in love. But Sara Fitch is an enigma to him, a creature of almost perverse mystery. Steven Grout is paranoid - and with justice. He knows that They are out to get him. They are. Quiss, insecure in his fabulous if ramshackle castle, is forced to play interminable impossible games. The solution to the oldest of all paradoxical riddles will release him. But he must find an answer before he knows the question. Park, Grout, Quiss - no trio could be further apart. But their separate courses are set for collision

BANKS, Iain Innocent in the ways of the world, an ingénue when it comes to pop and fashion, the Elect of God of a small but committed Stirlingshire religious cult: Isis Whit is no ordinary teenager. When her cousin Morag — Guest of Honour at the Luskentyrian's four-yearly Festival of Love — disappears after renouncing her faith, Isis is marked out to venture among the Unsaved and bring the apostate back into the fold. But the road to Babylondon (as Sister Angela puts it) is a treacherous one, particularly when Isis discovers that Morag appears to have embraced the ways of the Unsaved with spectacular abandon...

BANKS, Iain M. The war raged across the galaxy. Billions had died, billions more were doomed. Moons, planets, the very stars themselves, faced destruction, cold-blooded, brutal, and worse, random. The Idirans fought for their Faith; the Culture for its moral right to exist. Principles were at stake. There could be no surrender. Within the cosmic conflict, an individual crusade. Deep within a fabled labyrinth on a barren world, a Planet of the Dead proscribed to mortals, lay a fugitive Mind. Both the Culture and the Idirans sought it. It was the fate of Horza, the Changer, and his motley crew of unpredictable mercenaries, human and machine, actually to find it, and with it their own destruction.

BANKS, Iain M. In the winter palace, the King's new physician has more enemies than she at first realises. But then she also has more remedies to hand than those who wish her ill can know about. In another palace across the mountains, in the service of the regicidal Protector General, the chief bodyguard too has his enemies. He also has at least one person he cares for deeply and who cares for him, though neither can risk saying so. Spiralling round a central core of secrecy, deceit, love and betrayal, two stories - linked more closely than even those involved can know - climb to a devastating climax.

BANKS, Iain M. Two and a half millennia ago, the artifact appeared in a remote corner of space, beside a trillion-year-old dying sun from a different universe. It was a perfect black-body sphere, and it did nothing. Then it disappeared. Now it is back.

BANKS, Iain M. The Player Of Games The Culture - a human / machine symbiotic society - has thrown up many great Game Players, and one of the greatest is Gurgeh. Jernau Morat Gurgeh. The Player of Games. Master of every board, computer and strategy. Bored with success, Gurgeh travels to the Empire of Azad, cruel and incredibly wealthy, to try their fabulous game ... a game so complex, so like life itself, that the winner becomes emperor. Mocked, blackmailed, almost murdered, Gurgeh accepts the game, and with it the challenge of his life - and very possibly his death.

BARKER, Pat Craiglockhart War Hospital, Scotland, 1917, where army psychiatrist William Rivers is treating shell-shocked soldiers. Under his care are the poets and , as well as mute Billy Prior, who is only able to communicate by means of pencil and paper. Rivers’s job is to make the men in his charge healthy enough to fight. Yet the closer he gets to mending his patients’ minds the harder becomes every decision to send them back to the horrors of the front …

BARKER, Pat This is the second novel in the Regeneration Trilogy. The Eye in the Door is set in London, beginning in mid-April, 1918, and continues the interwoven stories of Dr William Rivers, Billy Prior, and Siegfried Sassoon begun in Regeneration. It ends some time before the conclusion of the First World War later the same year. The third part of the trilogy, , continues the story. Whereas Regeneration is an anomalous, but not unique, mixture of fact and fiction, The Eye in the Door acknowledges real events, including the campaign against homosexuals being waged that year by right-wing MP , but remains consistently within the realm of fiction. This grants Barker more freedom to explore her characters and their actions, the descriptions of which might be considered slanderous if attributed to real people. A major theme of the book, Prior's intense and indiscriminate bisexuality, is effectively contrasted with Rivers's tepid asexuality and Sassoon's pure homosexuality. Greater fictional scope also permits a deeper treatment of the psychological, political, and professional life of the central character, Billy Prior.

BARKER, Pat The Ghost Road This is the third novel in the Regeneration Trilogy. Prior, despite his new-found peace of mind and engagement to munitions worker Sarah, has been affected by the war and therefore does not have a lot of concern for his safety. Prior has been cured of shell-shock and is preparing to return to France. Rivers, concerned for Prior's safety, finally recognises that his relationship with Prior, and his other patients for that matter, is deeply paternal. In contrast with upper-class officers like Sassoon, with whom Rivers has been able to form warm friendships, he has always found Prior to be a thorn in his side. As Prior returns to the front, Rivers continues to take care of his patients and his invalid sister, amid this he reminisces uncomfortably about his childhood and memories of his experience ten years earlier on an anthropological expedition to Melanesia (now Eddystone Island). There, he befriended Nijiru, the local priest-healer who took Rivers on his rounds to see sick villagers and also to the island's sacred Place of the Skulls.[1]

BLAKE, George The Shipbuilders This is a very engaging and thoughtful novel about Glasgow,second city of the empire,during the grim days of the 1930's Great Depression. Following the lives of a shipyard owner and a lowly riveter,Blake creates a highly readable account of this great Northern city during one of its bleakest periods. Football matches,crowded pubs,busy thoroughfares,criminal courts and the ever present ribbon of life that is the produce a fascinating document of urban Scotland in the Thirties.

BROWN, George Douglas The House With The Green Shutters This is a superb novel, bitterly funny but at the same time intense and disturbing in its realism. One of the best things about the book is the way that the author lets you know almost from the beginning exactly what is going to happen; you sit back and wait for the inevitable unfolding with mounting horror, not unlike young John waiting for his father's wrath in the kitchen of the eponymous house when he returns home having been expelled from university. The malicious gossip and the petty schemes that the townsfolk use to get one over each other are treated in a really cynical and sarcastic way; you can all but taste the author's bile. Although the book is set in the nineteenth century you can still recognise similar characters in any Scottish town today.

BROWN, George Mackay Hawkfall And Other Stories A selection of stories set in the Orkney Islands at various historical periods. Atmospheric, touched occasionally by the supernatural, these tales capture the hard lives of the fishermen and crofters, and explore the potential for loneliness in this remote place. Filled with sadness at the gradual depopulation of these islands, the stories address the departure of the young folk and those with a more adventurous spirit for new lives in the cities or the Dominions. This theme of change pervades even those stories set in the twentieth century: we are reminded by Scandanavian names that the Orkneys were once not part of Scotland, and that the islanders are the descendants of the Vikings.

BROWN, George Mackay Greenvoe Greenvoe, the tight-knit community on the Orcadian island of Hellya, has existed unchanged for generations. However, a sinister military/industrial project, Operation Black Star, requires the island for unspecified purposes and threatens the islanders' way of life. In this, his first novel (1972), George Mackay Brown recreates a week in the life of the island community as they come to terms with the destructiveness of Operation Black Star. A whole host of characters - The Skarf, failed fishermen and Marxist historian; Ivan Westray, boatman and dallier; pious creeler Samuel Whaness; drunken fishermen Bert Kerston; earth-mother Alice Voar, and meths-drinker Timmy Folster - are vividly brought to life in this sparkling mixture of prose and poetry. In the end Operation Black Star fails, but not before it has ruined the island. But the book ends on a note of hope as the islanders return to celebrate the ritual rebirth of Hellya.

BROWN, George Mackay Winter Tales This is a superb collection of stories, focusing on light and darkness, winter and its festivals, by one of the greatest story-tellers of the twentieth century. Through a variety of characters from shipwrecked Scandinavians to an Edinburgh gentleman, George Mackay Brown looks at the impact of new ways of thinking on the traditional way of life of Orkney.

BUCHAN, John The Thirty Nine Steps Richard Hannay, falsely accused of murder, has only a few days to discover the secret of the thirty nine steps and thwart a German spy ring.

BUCHAN, John Greenmantle The book opens in November 1915, with Hannay and his friend Sandy convalescing from wounds received at the Battle of Loos. Hannay is summoned to the Foreign Office by Sir Walter Bullivant, a senior intelligence man, who Hannay met and assisted in The Thirty-Nine Steps. Bullivant gives Hannay an outline of the political situation in the Middle East, and hints that the Germans and their Turkish allies are plotting to cause a great uprising throughout the Muslim world, that will throw the whole of the Middle East, India and North Africa into turmoil; Bullivant proposes that Hannay takes on the task of investigating rumours. The only clue he is given is a slip of paper left by a spy, Bullivant's own son, recently killed in the region, bearing the words Kasredin, cancer and v.I.

BURNSIDE, John The Mercy Boys The Mercy Boys are four Dundee men who meet every day in their local pub and drink: first to find order, then oblivion. Each has his own ghosts, his dreams of escape. But when death comes to the Mercy Boys it comes suddenly and with staggering violence, and their dreams of leaving bleed into nightmares.

BURNSIDE, John The Dumb House In Persian myth, it is said that Akbar the Great once built a palace which he filled with newborn children, attended only by mutes, in order to learn whether language is innate or aquired. As the year passed and the chidren grew into their silent and difficult world, this palace became known as the Gang Mahal, or Dumb House. In his first novel, John Burnside explores the possibilites inherent in a modern-day repetition of Akbar`s investigations. Following the death of his mother, the unnamed narrator creates a twisted varient of the Dumb House, finally using his own chidren as subjects in a bizarre experiment. When the children develop a musical language of their own, however, their gaoler is the one who is excluded, and he extracts an appalling revenge.

CAMERON, Allan The Golden Menagerie The narrator – an awkward, lanky, pink-mohicaned adolescent boy from Croydon, whose father works for a company that imports bathroom accessories – finds that his life is about to change… in more ways than one. The eccentrically named Lucian cannot ever have imagined that by accepting a stranger’s invitation to join their mirth-seeking sect, he would not just be about to transform his life, but also his human form. His desire for the wise and magnanimous Fotis – a woman of pheromonal intensity – plunges him into a series of nightmarish metamorphoses where he undergoes life as a poodle, a parrot, a cat and a vulture.

CAMPION, Jane The Piano Ada, together with her nine-year-old illegitimate daughter Flora, and her piano, leave Scotland to arrive in the remote bush of 19th-century New Zealand for a marriage arranged by her father. Although mute, she does not consider herself silent as her piano is the vehicle of her expression. and he controls every single one of Discovery's components. The crew must overthrow this digital psychotic if they hope to make their rendezvous with the entities that are responsible not just for the monolith, but maybe even for human civilization.

DILLON, Des Six Black Candles Caroline's husband abandons her (bad move) for Stacie Gracie, his assistant at the meat counter, and incurs more wrath than he anticipated. Caroline, her five sisters, mother and granny, all with a penchant for witchery, invoke the lethal spell of the Six Black Candles. A natural reaction to the break up of a marriage? Set in present day Irish Catholic Coatbridge, "Six Black Candles" is bound together by the ropes of traditional storytelling and the strength of female familial relationships. Bubbling under the cauldron of superstition, witchcraft and religion is the heat of revenge; and the love and venom of sisterhood.

DILLON, Des Me And Ma Gal In this classic novel of childhood, Des Dillon takes us through a day in the lives of two best friends, Derek and Gal. Set against the Coatbridge landscape of slagpits and steelworks, they encounter the whole range of life's challenges in a brief twenty-four hours. Des Dillon has created a fresh, sharp and hugely entertaining story of an innocence that is all too short lived and vulnerable.

DOLAN, Chris Ascension Day There are five main characters in Chris Dolan's remarkable new novel: William, a Glaswegian living the good life, retired out in South Africa, his only trouble being his very openly naturist (and septuagenarian) neighbours. That is, until he starts to receives strange letters from back home. There is Cannibal, who knows nothing but contemporary Glasgow and its raw realities. "He'd been Cannibal ever since he was 13 and had bitten a great lump out of his mother's face." He inhabits a twilight world of half-deserted housing estates and children's homes, among friends, or acquaintances, called Mags, Bubbles, Photofit and Koff. There is a girl called Paris: and although "it might be all right being called Paris in Surrey or Sevenoaks or New York", in Glasgow it gets her into all sorts of trouble. There is Morag, who turns out to be William's letter-writer. And not least, there is Glasgow itself, remembered still in William's imagination, as the old shipbuilding centre of the world, where "the factories pump and bellow, cranes raise their fists," as in former days of glory.

DONOVAN, Anne Buddha Da In her hugely acclaimed debut Anne Donovan tells an endearing, humorous yet unsentimental story of a working-class Glaswegian man who discovers Buddhism, rejects old habits and seeks a life more meaningful, only to alienate his immediate family in the process.

DONOVAN, Anne Being Emily Things are never dull in the O’Connell family. Squeezed between her quiet older brother and the mischievous line-dancing twins Fiona finds her escape in the books of Emily Bronte. But tragedy is not confined to Victorian novels, and life for Fiona is about to change forever.

DONOVAN, Anne Hieroglyphics (Short Stories) A beautiful collection - charming, witty and touching - these stories give voice to a variety of different characters: from the little girl who wants to look 'subtle' for her father's funeral, a child who has an email pen pal on Jupiter and an old lady who becomes a star through 'zimmerobics'.

FRANCIS, Richenda The Blood Is Strong A young Canadian girl returns to the Hebridean island from which her ancestors were forced to emigrate and suddenly finds herself swept into the past of those very ancestors. She re-lives the harsh realities of nineteenth-century Uist life and the merciless evictions from the township in 1851 - the black houses are burned over the heads of the people and they must carry her dying mother and their few possessions to shelter in a cave above the ruins. So real is the past that her very identity is threatened. Is she the Gaelic speaking Catriona who embarked so reluctantly on the emigrant ship or is she the research student Kat MacDonald recovering from a broken love affair? Where does her destiny lie?

FRIEL, George Mr Alfred M.A. Introduced by Douglas Gifford.Mr Alfred is an elderly schoolteacher dogged by a sense of failure. The rejection of his poetry and his nightly escape to the pub all contribute to his malaise. Perhaps most harrowing is his innocent but obsessive love for Rose, one of his pupils. This ‘affair’ is maliciously reported and he is torn from his familiar job and transferred to an even rougher school. Against a nightmarish background of gang warfare and public desecration the story reaches a frightening climax.This novel provides significant observation of a critical period in the saga of modern, urban youth.

GALLACHER, Stephan Chimera The novel is set in the isolated and somewhat sleepy Yorkshire town of Langstone, where a fertility clinic has been running under the direction of a scientist by the name of Jenner. The plot soon takes form as the reader learns of a mass murder that has just occurred in the confines of the clinic. The storyline follows the likeable character of Peter Carson, a freelance journalist with little ambition but a wealth of money left in a trust fund by his father. Carson agrees to visit one of the nurses at the clinic, but upon arrival is escorted away by the local police. Carson learns of the fate of the nurse he planned to visit and begins to get more intrigued with the whole conspiracy side of the affair as the army quickly take over. The truth is slowly unearthed that the clinic was a large cover-up for a government run operation that was focussed on developing the capability to create bizarre hominids (half-chimpanzee-half-human's) that could be used cheaply for scientific testing. The first experimental attempt at one of these hominids was a creation named Chad, whose escape was the reason behind the events at the Jenner clinic. Chad is now being hunted by the army.

GALLOWAY, Janice The Trick Is To Keep Breathing An account from the inside of a mind cracking up...its writing is as taut as a bowstring. From brilliant title to closing injunction, it hums with intelligence, clarity, wit; and, its heroine's struggle for order and meaning seduces our minds, exposes how close we all of us are to insanity. Joy, as Galloway's heroine reluctantly lets us know that she's called, is simply that dangerous step or two nearer the edge'

GALLOWAY, Janice Where You Find It In her latest collection of stories, Janice Galloway turns her unflinching gaze on relationships: the struggle to love against the odds, the overpowering yearning to communicate, and the extraordinary epiphanies where the World falls away leaving only the lovers. Love is, of course, where you find it, and it is here in an evening walk across a London bridge, a chip-shop pizza, Derek's mouth, or ham sandwiches cut into hearts. A brilliant observer of human frailty and tenderness, Janice Galloway examines the moments where lives split like a stone, where people are healed or broken by a word or the touch of a hand. Savagely accurate, vivid and unsentimental, these are painstakingly crafted stories: engaging, caustic, funny and terrifyingly true.

GALLOWAY, Janice Foreign Parts What begins as a driving holiday in Northern France for two Scotswomen turns into a caustic and funny account of dysfunctional relationships - both between men and women and between women friends. Cassie and Rona - in their late thirties, both single and childless - are on each other's nerves from the moment they cross the Channel: Cassie is testy and cynical, Rona patient and plodding. Both are self-conscious of the fact that they seem to fit the stereotype of two "spinsters" linked by loneliness, and consequently rebel against the notion that a woman needs a man to feel "complete". Faced with the dilemma of "fancying men and not liking them very much", the women ponder the alternatives as they endure one tourist nightmare after another.

GIBBON, Lewis Grassic The Speak Of The Mearns – Short Stories And Essays This essential collection from Lewis Grassic Gibbon comprises short stories, essays and a novel, "The Speak of the Mearns", which was unfinished at the time of the author's death in 1935. Grassic Gibbon's fame rests mainly on the trilogy, "A Scots Quair", and the short stories, some well known, exhibit the same elements - powerful, dramatic writing and a distinctive local flavour - found in the novels. "The Speak of the Mearns" is a sharply observed unsentimental portrait of a rural coastal community seen through the eyes of a young boy growing up there. The essays put on record the author's views on politics and religion.

GIBBON, Lewis Grassic Sunset Song Sunset Song is the first novel in the trilogy A Scots Quair; the other two are Cloud Howe and Grey Granite. It tells the story of Chris Guthrie, a young woman growing up in a close knit farming community near Stonehaven just before the First World War. It depicts the hardship and the romance of working the land. The north-east dialect and lyricism on the Scottish landscape is woven into a powerful realist narrative making it a classic of Scottish literature.

GIBBON, Lewis Grassic Cloud Howe Lewis Grassic Gibbon's follow-up to Sunset Song, Cloud Howe carries on the saga of Chris Guthrie as her story moves from the rural Mearns to the small town of Segget. Grassic Gibbon matches his previous evocations of Scottish rural life with his descriptions of the struggles of village life in post-war Scotland. As the middle chapter of the Scots Quair trilogy Cloud Howe is as essential as its predecessor.

GIBBON, Lewis Grassic Grey Granite The final book of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's A Scots Quair. Grey Granite carries on from the two previous volumes and sees our protagonist Chris Guthrie move to the fictional city of Duncairn, allowing Grassic Gibbon to take on the harsh realities of Scottish urban life in the 1930s.

GRAY, Alasdair Unlikely Stories, Mostly A series of short narratives.

GRAY, Alasdair Lanark – A Life In 4 Books Lanark, a modern vision of hell set in the disintegrating cities of Unthank and Glasgow, tells the interwoven stories of Lanark and Duncan Thaw. A work of extraordinary, playful imagination, it conveys a profound message, both personal and political, about humankind's inability to love, and yet our compulsion is to go on trying

GRAY, Muriel Furnace When truck driver Josh Spiller pulls his eighteen-wheeler into the affluent mountain town of Furnace, Virginia, he expects nothing more than a hot meal and a place to rest. But Furnace is no ordinary town, and Josh will soon find out that he's become a pawn in a centuries-old game -- one with consequences more terrifying than his darkest nightmare. A mysterious strip of parchment has been left in Josh's rig bearing the words Five Days Alive Permitted. Now Josh is racing against time to return the cursed runes that could condemn him to an unspeakably painful and grisly death. And the fiery beast that stalks his every move -- the one which threatens both his sanity and his life -- is nothing compared to the human evil of Furnace, Virginia.

GREIG, Andrew That Summer It is 1940 and Britain is at war with Germany. France has fallen and with Britain the next, and most crucial, country in Hitler's path, the threat shifts to unfamiliar terrain - the skies and an epic battle between the Luftwaffe and the RAF. Lenny is a young and inexperienced fighter pilot stationed in Gravesend. After a meeting at a dance with Stella, a radar operator with a more worldly attitude altogether, he falls in love for the first time. She is his eyes on the ground, he is her protector in the air, and as the battle intensifies so their affair gathers pace in an increasingly uncertain time. Class and national barriers lose their distinction and a heady whirl of parties, drinking and promiscuity distracts from the more serious business at hand. Told in intimate, alternate chapters from the perspectives of Lenny and Stella, That Summer matures into a breathtaking novel; a classic love story and a thrilling picture of life during wartime.

GREIG, Andrew Electric Brae At the centre of Electric Brae is the crumbling sea-stack of the Old Man of Hoy and the consuming relationship between a young artist, Kim, coldly passionate, talented, secretive, and Jimmy, a North Sea roughneck, engineer and climber. Acclaimed on publication for marking a brave new direction in the course of Scottish fiction, Electric Brae is a story of love and loss, loyalty and betrayal, and fathers and children.

GUNN, Neil M. After a lifetime at sea, old Sandy returns to the land of his fathers to live out his remaining years in the peaceful isolation of a Highland croft. His companions are his dog Queenie, a temperamental cow Nancy, a few hens and his precious books. He befriends the local village boys who come to trust him. When one of these boys, Allan, seeks his helps after killing the man who has seduced his girlfriend, Sandy takes his side, warding off suspicious enquiries from the village policeman, the dead man's brother. Allan's girlfriend also comes to seek refuge with Sandy and eventually gives birth to her baby there. A moving and satisfying blend of tragedy and comedy, Blood Hunt has a powerful message - the triumph of love over anger and of the unending renewal of nature. It is a masterly novel by a writer in full maturity. It was Gunn's second last novel and one of his most masterly.

GUNN, Neil M. Highland River The plot is episodic and moves between Kenn's childhood and adult life.[1] It begins with a young Kenn poaching his first salmon from the Dunbeath river. HE encounters a sadistic beating from a schoolmaster, adventures in the trenches which result in his brother Angus suffering from shellshock and he meets Radzyn, an intellectual, scientific European who does not share Kenn's belief in the mystery of existence. Kenn's ultimate goal is to 'get back to the source of...life... the source of the river and the source of himself'.[2]

GUNN, Neil M. The Silver Darlings The story focuses on Finn, a living symbol of Scotland's heroic past, as he grows through boyhood to maturity and fulfilment, bringing hope to his widowed mother and to the coastal communities of Caithness and Sutherland. Finn is not "whiter than white": he delights in the challenges of life and on occasions is dangerously impetuous; but he displays the kind of male strength that leaves room for tenderness and sacrificial love. As a boy, he undertakes a walk of marathon proportions in order to seek help when cholera strikes his village, and later risks his life in the face of sea and storm in attempting to rescue his fellow fishermen.

HENDERSON, Meg The Holy City, Tells the story of Marion McLeod, the daughter of a riveter, who has been brought up in the Clydebank tenements and brings the horror and pain of these wartime experiences vividly to life as she loses her entire family in the Blitz.

HIND, Archie The Dear Green Place Set in the Southside of Glasgow of the 1960s. Mat Craig is from proud working-class stock, born into a large family who consider putting pen to paper as something shameful that should be suppressed. The narrative swings between sections where Mat temporarily shelves his dreams to work with his brother in a slaughterhouse, and moments when he abandons employment in the name of literature: something he’s not absolutely certain he believes in, or is any good at. Hind deals beautifully with questions of art over real life, juxtaposing the pull of creativity with Mat’s inability to pay the bills, even succeeding in making the slitting, slashing and chopping of animals in the killing rooms seem romantic with his restrained tone.

HOGG, James The Private Memoirs And Confessions Of A Justified Sinner In the early years of the 18th century, Scotland is torn by religious and political strife. Hogg's sinner, justified by his Calvinist conviction that his own salvation is pre-ordained, is suspected of involvement in a series of bizarre and hideous crimes. A century later his memoirs reveal the extraordinary, macabre truth. The tale is chilling for its astute psychological accuracy as it illustrates, with power and economy, the dire effect of self-righteous bigotry on a fanatical character.

JARDINE, QUINTIN Skinner’s Festival An explosion rocks Princes Street in the midst of the Edinburgh Festival. Responsibility is claimed by a group supposedly demanding political separation from Britain, but as atrocities escalate Skinner realises this is no gang of fanatics, but a highly professional team. The Fighters for an Independent Scotland want the English out of Scotland too and they're ready to back up their demands with bombings, murders and blackmail threats aimed at wreaking havoc at the Edinburgh Festival of the Arts. But the Fighters haven't reckoned with Assistant Chief Constable Bob Skinner, head of the Edinburgh CID and security adviser to Secretary of State Alan Ballantyne. Even as craven Ballantyne vows empty defiance of the Fighters, defending his principles with the blood of innocent coppers and bystanders, Skinner assembles a crack task force, carries the ball when the Secretary fumbles on the air, and wrestles with the beast within, who emerges with periodic ferocity to foil a clever, greedy scheme involving the crown jewels and Skinner's own daughter.

JARDINE, QUINTIN Skinner’s Ghosts Deputy Chief Constable Bob Skinner could be forgiven for thinking not only that someone up there doesn't like him, but that someone down here is out to get him. Suffering the strain of a marriage on the rocks, the last thing he needs is for his private life to be plastered across the front pages of a sleazy tabloid. To make matters worse, two brutal murders and new allegations about Skinner himself make simultaneous headlines. As time ticks away, Skinner faces the greatest, and most personal, tests of his career. Unless he can clear his name and uncover the secret behind the series of brutal crimes, he stands to lose everything: his family, his career and even his life and liberty.

JENKINS, Robin A Would Be saint Tells the story of Gavin Hamilton, a young man growing up before World War II. As a boy, Gavin is noted for his unworldliness and idealism, but the people of his small Scottish town come into conflict with him as he grows up to be a conscientious objector during the war.

JENKINS, Robin The Cone Gatherers An immensely powerful examination of mankind's propensity for both good and evil, inspired by the author's wartime experience as a conscientious objector doing forestry work Calum and Neil are the cone-gatherers—two brothers at work in the forest of a large Scottish estate. But the harmony of their life together is shadowed by the obsessive hatred of Duror, the gamekeeper. Set during World War II yet removed from the destruction and bloodshed of the war, the brothers' oblivious happiness becomes increasingly fragile as darker forces close in around them. JENKINS, Robin The Changeling Thirteen-year-old Tom Curdie, the product of a Glasgow slum, is on probation for theft. His teachers admit that he is clever, but only one, Charles Forbes, sees an uncanny warmth in his reticence and in his seemingly insolent smile. So he decides to take Tom on holiday with his own family...

JENKINS, Robin Fergus Lamont From his origins as an illegitimate child in the slums of Glasgow, Fergus Lamont sets out to reclaim his inheritance and to remake his identity as soldier, poet, and would-be aristocrat. Covering the years from the turn of the century to World War II, Fergus's unforgettable voice recounts a tale of vanity, success, and betrayal which shines its own sardonic light on Scotland and the cultural and political issues of the day. At odds with his origins and unsettled in his aristocratic pretensions, Fergus Lamont reaches middle age before he is offered at least the hope of redemption in a love affair with an island woman

JENKINS, Robin Mathew & Sheila Robin Jenkins returns to the fictional fishing community of Lunderston to trace the story of two school-aged children, Matthew and Sheila, thrown together following the death of Matthew's mother. Deserted and rejected by his father and grandfather, Matthew is taken to Lunderston by his guardian where he encounters Sheila who forces her way into his life and introduces him to her own darker beliefs and habits. Together they flirt with the possibilities of murder and the supernatural as a solution to his problems...

JENKINS, Robin Just Duffy Set amidst the urban decay of Lanarkshire, this novel creates a modern-day "Confessions of a Justified Sinner". Convinced of his own rectitude and appalled at the moral squalor around him, Duffy declares war on society. Duffy is a ferocious indictment of Calvinist moral certainty.

KAY, Jackie The death of legendary jazz trumpeter Joss Moody exposes an extraordinary secret. Unbeknown to all but his wife Millie, Joss was a woman living as a man. The discovery is most devastating for their adopted son, Colman, whose bewildered fury brings the press to the doorstep and sends his grieving mother to the sanctuary of a remote Scottish village. A novel about the lengths to which people will go for love, Trumpet is a moving story of a shared life founded on an intricate lie, of loving deception and lasting devotion, and of the intimate workings of the human heart.

KERR, Philip Gridiron Los Angeles, 1988 Ray Richardson, a brilliant architechnologist, has created a dazzling new building: 'The Gridiron', in the heart of L. A. The Gridiron represents the state-of-the-art in smart buildings: every aspect of the building, from temperature control to security, is controlled by an intricate computer system. On the eve of the building's official opening, a team gathers to put the finishing touches to Ray's new masterpiece. But there are a couple of unexplained deaths, which the team at first puts down to saboteurs. It is only when they discover how bizarre these deaths are that they realise the building - through its computer - is controlling them, and is set to destroy its creators.

KESSON, Jessie The White Bird Passes Jessie Kesson''s The White Bird Passes tells the moving story of a young girl''s experiences as she passes from the city streets into a bleak life in an orphanage in Scotland during the 1920s.

KESSON, Jessie Another Time, Another Place In the summer of 1944, three Italian prisoners of war are billeted in a remote village in the north-east of Scotland. For most of the locals, their arrival is of little interest, hardly distrubing the quiet routines of their isolated crofting community. But for the young farm-worker's wife who has to look after them, the Italians bring with them a tantalising glimpse of another, more exotic world, reawakening dreams of a future removed from the harsh realities of crofting life. A moving portrayal of the tragic consequences of a clash of cultures, Another Time, Another Place is a haunting tale of love and war from one of Scotland's finest authors.

KRAVITZ, Peter The Picador Book Of Contemporary Scottish Fiction An anthology of Scottish fiction, ranging from the traditional to the modern. James Kelman, and Candia McWilliam are joined by Irvine Welsch, Janice Galloway and A.L. Kennedy.

LEGGE, Gordon The Shoe The Shoe follows three days in Archie's life where arguments about football and the relative merits of his record collection loom large. The focus is on Archie and his group of friends: Davie, the Mental Kid, Richard, and Dostoyevsky, the intelligent, fun-loving, vegan Doberman. And all this has a soundtrack - whether it's Prince: 'makes God look like a prototype', classic Motown, Joy Division, or Van Morrison: 'awesome'. 'His characters fall in and out, mess around, bitch about each other and then all head off to the pub, leaving the reader shouting, "That's me, that's me!"

McEWAN, Ian The Cement Garden This is a story about a family of children who find themselves orphaned while living in a house surrounded by a wasteland, an image that perfectly reflects the emptiness of their days. Finding themselves without adult guidance, it shows how they slide into sloth and then perversity. Despite the shocking nature of the story, it has a realistic feel to it - One feels that these events could happen given the circumstances. The characters are delinated so convincingly that the reader, despite the perverse nature of the protaganists actions, is drawn into their dark world and is made to see it from their point of view.

McEWAN, Ian Saturday Saturday, February 15, 2003. Henry Perowne is a contented man - a successful neurosurgeon, the devoted husband of Rosalind and proud father of two grown-up children. Unusually, he wakes before dawn, drawn to the window of his bedroom and filled with a growing unease. What troubles him as he looks out at the night sky is the state of the world - the impending war against Iraq, a gathering pessimism since 9/11, and a fear that his city and his happy family life are under threat.

Later, Perowne makes his way to his weekly squash game through London streets filled with hundreds of thousands of anti-war protestors. A minor car accident brings him into a confrontation with Baxter, a fidgety, aggressive, young man, on the edge of violence. To Perowne's professional eye, there appears to be something profoundly wrong with him. Towards the end of a day rich in incident and filled with Perowne's celebrations of life's pleasures, his family gathers for a reunion. But with the sudden appearance of Baxter, Perowne's earlier fears seem about to be realised.

McEWAN, Ian Black Dogs Set in late 1980s Europe at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Black Dogs is the intimate story of the crumbling of Bernard and June Tremaine’s marriage, as witnessed by their son-in-law, Jeremy, who seeks to comprehend how their deep love could be defeated by ideological differences that seem irreconcilable. In writing June’s memoirs, Jeremy is led back to a moment, that was, for June, as devastating and irreversible in its consequences as the changes sweeping Europe in Jeremy’s own time

McEWAN, Ian Amsterdam On a chilly February day, two old friends meet in the throng outside a London crematorium to pay their last respects to Molly Lane. Both Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday had been Molly's lovers in the days before they reached their current eminence: Clive is Britain's most successful modern composer, and Vernon is editor of the newspaper The Judge. Gorgeous, feisty Molly had other lovers, too, notably Julian Garmony, Foreign Secretary, a notorious right-winger tipped to be the next prime minister.

In the days that follow Molly's funeral, Clive and Vernon will make a pact with consequences that neither could have foreseen. Each will make a disastrous moral decision, their friendship will be tested to its limits, and Julian Garmony will be fighting for his political life.

McILLVANNEY, William Jack Laidlaw's Glasgow is a city of hard men, powerful villains and self-made businessmen, of big industry and its victims, of enduring women, terrible slums and, one morning, of murder. An unorthodox detective who cloaks compassion with sardonic wit, Laidlaw knows the right questions to ask, threading his way through the pubs and clubs, the bookies' and tenements, trying to find the killer of a young, apparently innocent girl.

McILLVANNEY, William A Scottish miner becomes unemployed during a union strike. He is unable to support his family and cannot resolve his bitterness about his situation. Desperate for money, he accepts an offer made by a Glasgow gangster to fight in an illegal bare-knuckle boxing match. A long and brutal fight follows

McILLVANNEY, William At the end of 1903, in a tough, working-class town in the West of Scotland, Tam Docherty's youngest son, Conn is born. Tam is determined that life and the pits c won't swallow up his boy the way it has him. Courageous and questioning, Docherty emerges as a leader of almost indomitable strength, but in a close-knit community tradition is a powerful opponent McILLVANNEY, William The Papers Of Tony Veitch McIlvanney once again sets out on the dark side of Glasgow with Detective Jack Laidlaw. "The wine he gave me winsy wine" were the final words of Eck Adamson to Laidlaw, his only friend. Laidlaw is convinced the Eck was murdered and that an elusive young student, Tony Veitch, holds the key to the mystery.

McILLVANNEY, William A detective story that searches for answers to deep questions about life's injustice seeks to find why Glasgow investigator James Laidlaw's brother stepped in front of a car

McILLVANNEY, William In a Victorian mansion hotel on a Scottish island, a group of English Literature lecturers and students from Glasgow gather for a study weekend, though studying is not exactly what some of them have in mind. And the weekend does prove to be a major turning point in the emotional lives of several people just not quite in the way any of them expected. As entertaining as it is thought-provoking, William McIlvanney's novel brilliantly illustrates how humans are driven by animal instincts, but have the mental capacity to analyse, harness and rue them. Which also means we continue to dream, even when our dreams fail us.

MacBRIDE, Stuart Cold Granite Winter in Aberdeen: murder, mayhem and terrible weather… It’s DS Logan McRae’s first day back on the job after a year off on the sick, and it couldn’t get much worse. Three-year-old David Reid’s body is discovered in a ditch, strangled, mutilated and a long time dead. And he’s only the first. There’s a stalking the Granite City and the local media are baying for blood. Soon the dead are piling up in the morgue almost as fast as the snow on the streets, and Logan knows time is running out. More children are going missing. More are going to die. And if Logan isn’t careful, he could end up joining them

MacBRIDE, Stuart Dying Light It’s summertime in Scotland: the sun is shining, the sky is blue and people are dying…She’s just the first. How many more will die? It starts with Rosie Williams,beaten to death down by the docks. For DS Logan McRae it’s a bad start to another bad day. Rosie won’t be the only one making an unscheduled trip to the morgue. Across the city six people are burning to death in a petrol-soaked squat, the doors and windows screwed shut from the outside. And despite Logan’s best efforts, it’s not long before another prostitute turns up on the slab…

MacDOUGALL, Carl The Lights Below The story of Andy Patterson, a Glaswegian who has been in jail for two years. This book describes his difficulty in re-entering society, and the problems he encounters with both society and his family.

MacDOUGALL, Carl (ed) The Devil And The Giro – Two Centuries Of Scottish Short Stories (Short Stories) This collection includes short stories from all the major Scottish writers, both the famous and unsung: James Hogg, R.L. Stevenson, George MacDonald Fraser, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir Walter Scott, Hugh MacDiarmid, Muriel Spark, James Kelman and Alasdair Gray

MACKAY, Shena The Orchard On Fire When April Harlency and her parents move from Streatham to The Copper Kettle Tearoom in Kent April's whole life changes. Through her eyes we witness her rite of passage from childhood to adolescence. With her best friend, the wonderfully exciting but dangerous Ruby, they discover an idyllic secret world in the orchard. However, their lives are permeated with a sense of menace which is mainly centred on Mr Greenidge who befriends April and involves her in a sinister and uncomfortable relationship that will eventually lead to trouble for all her family.

MacKENZIE, Compton Whisky Galore Wartime food rationing is bad enough, but when the whisky supplies run out on the Hebridean Islands of Great and Little Todday, nothing seems to go right. Then the cargo of the shipwrecked S.S. "Cabinet Minister" brings salvation - in its most giddily intoxicating form.

MacLAVERTY, Bernard The Anatomy School Set in Belfast in the late sixties, Bernard MacLaverty's new novel takes us into Martin Brennan's last semester of high school, when he finds old friendships tested and is forced to face the unknown. Before he can become an adult, Martin must unravel the sacred and contradictory mysteries of religion, science, and sex; he must learn the value of friendship; but most of all he must pass his exams--at any cost. Celebrating the desire to speak and the need to say nothing, The Anatomy School moves from the enforced silence of Martin's Catholic school retreat, through the hilarious tea-and-biscuits repartee of his eccentric elders, to the awkward wit and loose profanity of his two friends--the charismatic Kavanagh and the subversive Blaise Foley.

MacLAVERTY, Bernard Cal Cal has very few choices in life. He can continue working at the abattoir that sickens him, or join the ranks of the unemployed. He can brood on his past or try to plan a future with Marcella. Cal is a haunting love story set against the fear and violence of Ulster, where tenderness and innocence must struggle to survive

MacLAVERTY, Bernard Lamb On a promontory jutting out into the Atlantic wind stands the Home run by Brother Benedict, where boys are taught a little of God and a lot of fear. To Michael Lamb, one of the youngest brothers, the regime is without hope, and when he inherits a small legacy he defies his elders and runs away, taking with him a twelve-year-old boy, Owen Kane. Radio Eireann call it a kidnapping. For Michael the act is the beginning of Owen's salvation. Posing as father and son, they concentrate on discovering the happiness that is so unfamiliar to them both. But as the outside world closes in around them - as time, money and opportunity run out - Michael finds himself moving towards a solution that is as uncompromising as it is inspired by love.

MacLEOD, KEN The Star Fraction Moh Kohn is a security mercenary, his smart gun and killer reflexes for hire. Janis Taine is a scientist working on memory-enhancing drugs, fleeing the US/UN's technology cops. Jordan Brown is a teenager in the Christian enclave of Beulah City, dealing in theologically-correct software for the world's fundamentalists-and wants out. In a balkanized twenty-first century, where the "peace process" is deadlier than war, the US/UN's spy satellites have everyone in their sights. But the Watchmaker has other plans, and the lives of Moh, Janis, and Jordan are part of the program. A specter is haunting the fight for space and freedom, the specter of the betrayed revolution that happened before. . . .

MAGUIRE, Susie Scottish Love Stories (Short Stories)

MUNRO, Neil The New Road Set in 1733, when General Wade opened the Highlands to trade with the Lowlands, the novel attacks the corruption at the heart of the Highlanders and depicts characters such as the blackmailer Barisdale and the evil Lord Lovat who symbolise the corruption and betrayal within the clans. The novel keeps the suspense going throughout and it is not until the final page that the truth about Æneas’s father, Paul, and the true treachery of Duncanson, is revealed.

MURRAY, Ian The New Penguin Book Of Scottish Short Stories (Short Stories) Throughout this collection, a preoccupation with the supernatural emerges, from the spiritual torment of John Buchan's "The Outgoing of the Tide" to the chilling premonition of Muriel Spark's "The House of the Famous Poet". While stories such as "Alicky's Watch" depict the influence of the Calvinist religion, darker subjects are frequently offset by the comedy found in tales like "A Wee Nip". Among the other contributors to this collection are Robert Louis Stevenson, Naomi Mitchison, and George Mackay Brown.

O’HAGEN, Andrew Our Fathers Hugh Provan was a Modernist hero. A dreamer, a Socialist, a man of the people, he led Scotland's towerblock programme after the war. Now he lies on a bed on the eighteenth floor. have changed. His flats are coming down. The idealism he learned from his mother is gone. And even as his breath goes out he clings to the old ways. His wife sings her Scots ballads to soothe him, yet his final months are plagued by memory and loss, by a bitter sense of his family and his country, who could not live up to the houses he built for them. Meanwhile the corruption hearings bring their hammer down on the past. Hugh's grandson, Jamie, comes home to watch over his dying mentor. The old man's final months bring Jamie to see what is best and worst in the past that haunts them all, and he sees the fears of his own life unravel in the land that bred him. He tells the story of his own family - a tale of pride and delusion, of nationality and strong drink, of Catholic faith and the end of the old Left. It is a tale of dark hearts and modern houses, of three men in search of Utopia.

POW, Tom (ed) Shouting It Out – Stories From Contemporary Scotland (Short Stories) This is an anthology of ten stories by Scottish writers. The authors include Janice Galloway, Alison Fell, Liz Lochhead, Ron Butlin and George Mackay Brown. Each story has a short preface by its author. The stories are by turns tender, humorous or exciting, and reflect contemporary life.

RANKIN, Ian Hide & Seek At night the summer sky stays light over Edinburgh. But in a shadowy, crumbling housing development, a junkie lies dead of an overdose, his bruised body surrounded by signs of Satanic worship. John Rebus could call the death and accident--but won't. Instead, he tracks down a violent- tempered young woman who knew the dead boy and heard him cry out his terrifyng last words: "Hide! Hide!" Now, with the help of a bright, conflicted young detective, Rebus is following the girl through a brutal world of bad deals, bad dope and bad company. From a beautiful city's darkest side to the private sanctums of the upper crust, Rebus is seeking the perfect hiding place for a killer,

RANKIN, Ian Black & Blue Rebus is juggling four cases trying to nail one killer - who might just lead back to the infamous John. And he's doing it under the scrutiny of an internal inquiry led by a man he has just accused of taking backhanders from Glasgow's Mr Big. As if this wasn't enough, there are TV cameras at his back investigating a miscarriage of justice, making Rebus a criminal in the eyes of a million or more viewers. Just one mistake is likely to mean an unpleasant and not particularly speedy death or, worse still, losing his job.

RANKIN, Ian The Black Book When a close colleague is brutally attacked, Inspector John Rebus is drawn into a case involving a hotel fire, an unidentified body, and a long forgotten night of terror and murder. Pursued by dangerous ghosts and tormented by the coded secrets of his colleague's notebook, Rebus must piece together the most complex and confusing of jigsaws. But not everyone wants the puzzle solved - perhaps not even Rebus himself ...

RANKIN, Ian Knots & Crosses Detective John Rebus: His city is being terrorized by a baffling series of murders...and he's tied to a maniac by an invisible knot of blood. Once John Rebus served in Britain's elite SAS. Now he's an Edinburgh cop who hides from his memories, misses promotions and ignores a series of crank letters. But as the ghoulish killings mount and the tabloid headlines scream, Rebus cannot stop the feverish shrieks from within his own mind. Because he isn't just one cop trying to catch a killer, he's the man who's got all the pieces to the puzzle...

RANKIN, Ian Doors Open Three friends descend upon an art auction in search of some excitement. Mike Mackenzie-retired software mogul, bachelor and fine art enthusiast-wants something that money can't buy. Fellow art-lover Allan Cruickshank is bored with his banking career and burdened by a painful divorce. And Robert Gissing, an art professor, is frustrated that so many paintings stay hidden in corporate boardrooms, safes and private apartments. After the auction-and a chance encounter with crime boss Chib Calloway-Robert and Allan suggest the "liberation" of several paintings from the National Gallery, hoping Mike will dissuade them. Instead, he hopes they are serious.

RANKIN, Ian "My dad used to say to me, 'Try to keep a cool head and a warm heart'. At least I think it was my dad. I don't really remember him." Gravy worked in the graveyard - hence the name. He was having a normal day until his friend Benjy turned up in a car Gravy didn't recognise. Benjy had a bullet hole in his chest, but lived just long enough to ask Gravy to hide him and look after his gun. Gravy had looked after things for Benjy before, but never a gun. When Gravy looked in the car he found blood, a balaclava and a bag stuffed with money. Gravy's not too bright but he wants to help his friend. So Gravy finds himself caught up in the middle of a robbery gone wrong, a woman who witnessed a murder, and some very unpleasant men who will do anything to get back the money Benjy stole...

SCOTT, J.D. The End Of An Old Song The End of an Old Song is the story of three young people, Alastair, a reckless careerist, Patrick an artist and Catherine the self-centred girl from whom they can't break free. Set in the thirties, the War Years and beyond, it also evokes the nostalgic passing of a way of life and the destruction of values symbolised by the decline of an old house, Kingisbyres

SCOTT, Sir Walter Rob Roy Rob Roy is set during the 1715 Jacobite uprising, which provides the background for a journey of self-discovery for another young romantic protagonist. The hero this time is a similarly naïve Southerner, Francis Osbaldistone, who travels first to the North of England and then to Scotland after having been wrongly accused of highway robbery during his journey, due to the machinations of his villainous cousin Rashleigh. In the wild place of the North, the land of lawlessness and loyalty, Frank, like Edward Waverley, finds something that is both liberating and disturbing. The 'Robin Hood of Scotland', Robert Roy MacGregor, embodies this ambivalence. He is both educated and capable of barbarism, fiercely attached to his cause and intensely practical. Frank is aided in his quest to clear his name, and also uncover greater truths, by the outlaw Rob, and by the sharp-tongued, strongly principled Amazonian Die Vernon, one of Scott's most attractive and well-rounded heroines.

SCOTT, Sir Walter Ivanhoe Set in the reign of Richard I, Coeur de Lion, Ivanhoe is packed with memorable incidents - sieges, ambushes and combats - and equally memorable characters: Cedric of Rotherwood, the die-hard Saxon; his ward Rowena; the fierce Templar knight, Sir Brian de Bois-Gilbert; the Jew, Isaac of York, and his beautiful, spirited daughter Rebecca; Wamba and Gurth, jester and swineherd respectively.

Scott explores the conflicts between the Crown and the powerful Barons, between the Norman overlords and the conquered Saxons, and between Richard and his scheming brother, Prince John. At the same time he brings into the novel the legendary Robin Hood and his band, and creates a brilliant, colourful account of the age of chivalry with all its elaborate rituals and costumes and its values of honour and personal glory.

SCOTT, Sir Walter Redgauntlet Set in the summer of 1765, Redgauntlet centres around a third, fictitious, Jacobite rebellion. Kidnapped by Edward Hugh Redgauntlet, a fanatical supporter of the Stewart cause, the young Darsie Latimer finds himself caught up in the plot to enthrone the exiled Prince Charles Edward Stewart. The novel follows Darsie's adventures and those of the advocate Alan Fairford, who sets out to rescue him. These two young men from very different backgrounds are united by friendship and their optimistic belief in the settled Hanoverian establishment

SEARLE, Adrian The Hope That Kills Us – An Anthology Of Scottish Football Fiction (Short Stories) Scottish football is the weirdest of organisms, simultaneously proving compelling and repulsive in equal measure. "The Hope That Kills Us" brings together specially commissioned stories from some of Scotland's best contemporary writers and discovers some startling new voices. Each story examines,from its own unique viewpoint, the participants, observers, experience and emotion that feed that nations football obsession.

SHERIDAN, Sara Truth Or Dare

SMITH, ALI The Whole Story – And Other Stories (Short Stories)

SMITH, Ali The Accidental The Accidental pans in on the Norfolk holiday home of the Smart family one hot summer. There a beguiling stranger called Amber appears at the door bearing all sorts of unexpected gifts, trampling over family boundaries and sending each of the Smarts scurrying from the dark into the light. A novel about the ways that seemingly chance encounters irrevocably transform our understanding of ourselves, The Accidental explores the nature of truth, the role of fate and the power of storytelling.

SMITH, Alexander McCall The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency Wayward daughters. Missing Husbands. Philandering partners. Curious conmen. If you've got a problem, and no one else can help you, then pay a visit to Precious Ramotswe, Botswana's only - and finest - female private detective. Her methods may not be conventional, and her manner not exactly Miss Marple, but she's got warmth, wit and canny intuition on her side, not to mention Mr J. L. B. Matekoni, the charming proprietor of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors. And Precious is going to need them all as she sets out on the trail of a missing child, a case that tumbles our heroine into a hotbed of strange situations and more than a little danger . . .

SMITH, Alexander McCall In The Company Of Cheerful Ladies Precious is busier than usual at the detective agency when she discovers an intruder in her house on Zebra Drive—and perhaps even more baffling--a pumpkin on her porch. Her associate, Mma Makutsi, also has a full plate. She's taken up dance lessons, only to be partnered with a man with two left feet. And at Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, where Mr J.L.B. Matekoni is already overburdened with work, one of his apprentices has run off with a wealthy older woman. But what finally rattles Mma Ramotswe’s normally unshakable composure is a visitor who forces her to confront a difficult secret from her past.

SMITH, Alexander McCall Morality For Beautiful Girls In Morality for Beautiful Girls, Precious Ramotswe, founder and owner of the only detective agency for the concerns of both ladies and others, investigates the alleged poisoning of the brother of an important “Government Man,” and the moral character of the four finalists of the Miss Beauty and Integrity Contest, the winner of which will almost certainly be a contestant for the title of Miss Botswana. Yet her business is having money problems, and when other difficulties arise at her fianc?’s Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, she discovers the reliable Mr J.L.B. Matekoni is more complicated then he seems.

SPARK, Muriel The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie Muriel Spark’s timeless classic about a controversial teacher who deeply marks the lives of a select group of students in the years leading up to World War II “Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life!” So asserts Jean Brodie, a magnetic, dubious, and sometimes comic teacher at the conservative Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh. Brodie selects six favorite pupils to mold—and she doesn’t stop with just their intellectual lives. She has a plan for them all, including how they will live, whom they will love, and what sacrifices they will make to uphold her ideals. When the girls reach adulthood and begin to find their own destinies, Jean Brodie’s indelible imprint is a gift to some, and a curse to others.

SPENCE, Alan Stone Garden (Short Stories)

SPENCE, Alan The Hope That Kills Us – An Anthology Of Scottish Football Fictio Scottish football is the weirdest of organisms, simultaneously proving compelling and repulsive in equal measure. "The Hope That Kills Us" brings together specially commissioned stories from some of Scotland's best contemporary writers and discovers some startling new voices. Each story examines,from its own unique viewpoint, the participants, observers, experience and emotion that feed that nations football obsession.

SPENCE, Alan The Magic Flute A colorful and deep examination of the growth from young teenagers to thirty something adults of a group of four boys from Scotland - religion, bigotry, terrorism, women are all thrown in the way of their growth and we get to enjoy the characters as they move through various stages of life.

SPENCE, Alan Way To Go Growing up in Glasgow as the son of an undertaker isn't easy for young Neil McGraw. His peers tease him mercilessly, the local girls ignore him, and his father punishes him by locking him in the coffin-filled basement. Neil's refusal to consider entering the morbid family business strains relations with his father, who is already resentful of his wife's death giving birth to his son. Things come to a head when Neil is caught entertaining a young lady in one of custom caskets and he runs away to bohemian London where he befriends a rag-tag group of hippies and finds happiness. But death and its quandaries follow Neil and he soon flees again, traveling the world for sixteen years seeking the answer to the question that has haunted him since youth: What happens when you die?When his father dies, Neil and company return to Glasgow and take over the family business, with a decidedly unconventional twist. Funerals, , and caskets are designed as custom works of art, celebrating the life and individuality of the deceased, and raising more than a few eyebrows.

STEVENSON, Robert Louis Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde A nightmare fantasy about the nature of good and evil. This is the tragic story of how one man’s experiments to find out about his own nature went horribly wrong.

STEVENSON, Robert Louis Weir Of Hermiston The novel tells the story of Archie Weir, a youth born into an upper-class Edinburgh family. Because of his Romantic sensibilities and sensitivity, Archie is estranged from his father, who is depicted as the coarse and cruel judge of a criminal court. By mutual consent, Archie is banished from his family of origin and sent to live as the local laird on a family property in the vicinity of Hermiston (now on Edinburgh's outskirts, and occupied by Heriot-Watt University, but then out in the countryside). While serving as the laird, Archie meets and falls in love with Kirstie (Christina). As the two are deepening their relationship, the book breaks off. Confusingly, there are two characters in the novel called Christina.

TORRINGTON, Jeff Swing Hammer Swing 'This tale of a week in the life of Tam Clay, slum-dweller, father-in-waiting and wordsmith manqué, is funny from beginning to end... As Tam stumbles through the drink-sodden world of the Gorbals underclass of the sixties, when a house in was an ambition, he embarks on a mini-odyssey of self-discovery while blinding the reader with literary legerdemain'

WALLACE, Christopher The Pied Piper’s Poison It's winter, 1946, and strange things are happening at Tarutz quarantine camp in Southern Poland, where a group of refugees has fallen victim to a horrific, unidentifiable disease. A young doctor is sent to identify the mysterious affliction now working its way through a growing list of victims. And in the winter of 1648, the ancient town of Hamelin struggles to survive the most savage war Europe has ever known. Besieged by a vicious mercenary army, confounded by the endless machination of its leaders, and gripped by starvation, fever, and vermin, Hamelin is desperate for any respite. Is there a connection between these two calamities?

WARNER, Alan Morven Callar Morvern Callar, a low-paid employee in the local supermarket in a desolate and beautiful port town in the west of Scotland, wakes one morning in late December to find her strange boyfriend has committed and is dead on the kitchen floor. Morvern's reaction is both intriguing and immoral. What she does next is even more appalling. Moving across a blurred European landscape-from rural poverty and drunken mayhem of the port to the Mediterranean rave scene-we experience everything from Morvern's stark, unflinching perspective. Morvern is utterly hypnotizing from her very first sentence to her last. She rarely goes anywhere without the Walkman left behind as a Christmas present by her dead boyfriend, and as she narrates this strange story, she takes care to tell the reader exactly what music she is listening to, giving the stunning effect of a sound track running behind her voice.

WELSH, Louise The Bullet Trick When down-at-heel Glasgow conjurer William Wilson gets booked for a string of cabaret gigs in Berlin, he's hoping his luck's on the turn. There were certain spectators from his last show who he'd rather forget. Like the one who's now a corpse. Amongst the showgirls and tricksters of Berlin's scandalous underground Wilson can abandon his heart, his head and, more importantly, his past. But secrets have a habit of catching up with him and, as he gets sucked into certain lucrative after-hours work, the line between what's an act and what's real starts to blur.

WELSH, Louise The Cutting Room Set in contemporary Glasgow, The Cutting Room is narrated by Rilke, one of the most engaging, flawed and hedonistic fictional creation of recent years. When this dissolute and promiscuous auctioneer comes upon a hidden collection of violent, and highly disturbing photographs, he feels compelled to unearth more about the deceased owner who coveted them. What follows is a compulsive journey of discovery, decadence and deviousness.

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