Sonja, the protagonist in Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, is a Danish translator who is working on a series of Swedish crime fiction novels. She is “over forty” and appears to have reached a midlife crisis when the novel begins. She decides to learn to drive, despite suffering from a form of inherited positional vertigo which can Read More
Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney’s pre-eminence as a poet is too well known to need any elucidation of course, but perhaps it is worth noting here that his prowess as a translator was also already evident in his Beowulf. Heaney undertook his verse translation of the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid to honour the memory of Read More
In this winning entry from the 2015 Dundee International Book prize, our hero, Paul, cycles through London streets made dangerous by loose cobbles, trams and steaming piles of horse manure. This farm boy from the highlands of Scotland, soon to be a cycling superhero, must steer himself safely through dangerous times, fuelled by cocaine and Read More
Martin Cathcart Froden’s debut historical crime novel “The Devil take the Hindmost” won the 2015 Dundee International Book Prize of five thousand pounds and publication with Freight Books. Set in the velodromes of London and the Midlands in the late nineteen twenties, it follows the adventures of a young highlander. Paul arrives at Kings Cross Read More
I’m about to interview James Kelman, inarguably one of the most important writers working in Britain today. As I climb the stairs of the University of Dundee’s Tower Building, I’m feeling terribly anxious. Over the course of his career, Kelman has garnered a bit of a reputation for giving quite thorny interviews and I’m Read More
Tom Hubbard was the first librarian of the Scottish Poetry Library and is the author, editor or co-editor of over thirty academic and literary works, including several novels and poetry collections. Slavonic Dances, the name given to a series of orchestral pieces by Dvorak, is a happy title for this sequence of novellas whose characters Read More
Cross Purpose is an energetic debut novel that attempts to perform a balancing act between a gritty Tartan Noir and a darkly comic detective novel. Claire MacLeary’s first novel jumps into Scottish crime fiction with both feet. She doesn’t flinch away from the torrid tedium of life in Scottish council estates, but embraces the dichotomy Read More
Lus na Tùise is, by any standard, a beautiful book and it is, perhaps, fitting that this parallel Gaelic-English collection was published in Nova Scotia. Those who have set expectations of what Gaelic poetry may be, are already alerted that all is not as it seems; Marcas Mac an Tuairneir hails from Yorkshire and has Read More
Reading Amali Rodrigo’s Lotus Gatherers is like taking into your mouth sweetness, sharpness and bitterness all at once. Then she engages your other senses – smell, sound, texture, colour. After that you’re hooked because beyond the initial sensory pull, there are greater riches, deeper depths. Lotus Gatherers is Rodrigo’s first collection, though she has already Read More