“I was bored stiff with it all and the referendum was still weeks away. Other people were starting to get fed up with it as well; the initial excitement had worn off by now, reality had kicked in and people were sick of the hullabaloo. We were being force-fed a diet of political candy floss, Read More
More than any of Denise Mina’s work to date, The Red Road is a novel about the past and its ability to haunt the present. Mina’s latest foray into Glaswegian crime and corruption involving Detective Inspector Alex Morrow is a story which begins on the night of Princess Diana’s death. Rose Wilson, a fourteen year Read More
Cynan Jones has a light touch with painful and ugly truths, as illustrated in his latest novel, The Dig. At the heart of this short work set in rural Wales is the intense desire for an elusive harmony, for which the principal characters search in very different ways. The themes of The Dig are isolation Read More
There is something compelling about the recent spate of texts that employ cartography or walking as a trope for addressing how we inhabit our environments: finding the rhythms of place and space, marking your body in relation not only to the world around you but also to physical, textual and figural ‘others’ that have traversed Read More
In something of a Carter-esque vein, Kirsty Logan’s debut collection of modern fairy tales, The Rental Heart and Other Stories, includes both tales of her own invention and seeks to add new flavour to old stories. Each short story presents the reader with an immersive fantastical world through which they may journey: the land of Read More
The third novel of the Glasgow born and bred novelist and scholar Nick Brookes, Indecent Acts is a book whose characters and themes remain with the reader for a long time, despite an initially challenging quality to both the content and the language of the volume. The book is written entirely in the first person, Read More
Something Chronic is a first novel by Dundee-born writer, historian, gay-activist and journalist Bob Cant. Set in Dundee and its surrounding area in the 1990s, this is a generous, quirky and humorous narrative that brings together local and global voices. It bridges the past and the present successfully and coaxes the reader not to dismiss Read More
Last summer, I met up with a close childhood friend who has lived abroad for many years. Heading to the pub, I was surprised to find myself nervous at the prospect of meeting him again after so many years. What if we’d changed, grown apart? What if we no longer had anything to talk about? Read More
Sunday evening on the M25. Darkness is falling when the traffic crunches to a sudden halt: “Standstill. The sky was tarnishing as black-winged night accelerated its descent. Over the swarms of grubby, gleaming machines, a fug of fumes sighed”. Various characters speculate on the cause of the holdup, with minimal success. The proffered explanations range Read More
Leaving the Atocha Station is a perfect little book to get lost in; it will in equal measures make you laugh, contemplate, and feel a bit better about yourself. The novel is essentially about a young American man, living in Madrid on a fellowship, who spends his days self-medicating, partaking in drugs, as well as, Read More