John Lister-Kaye’s ninth book, Gods of the Morning: A Bird’s Eye View of the Highland Year, reflects on landscape and wildlife, particularly birds – Virgil’s “gods of the morning” – over four seasons at Aigas, the Highland field centre by the Beauly River, which he owns. The book opens with the death of a blackcap Read More
A group of artists from the MFA Fine Arts and Humanities at the University of Dundee spent a week on the Greek island of Aegina. They paired up with local artists, found common ground, formed relationships and collaborated. The result is a fascinating blend of shared minds, memories and culture, inspired by the buildings, landscape Read More
The performance of Much Ado Abut Nothing by the Dundee Rep Ensemble, directed by Irene Macdougall, was fantastic, entertaining and frequently hilarious. Ken Harrison’s set was a simple yet impressive affair of Mediterranean tiles, ornate lights and transparent walls; the grand, uncluttered setting allowed the performers room to bring this Shakespeare comedy of love, Sicilian Read More
Originally from London but now living and working in Edinburgh, Pippa Goldschmidt is a former astronomer with a PhD in that field. Her transition into a writer has been very successful, garnering her several prizes and awards. Her debut novel The Falling Sky was the 2012 runner-up for the Dundee International Book Prize and her Read More
Kate Ashton was born in Scotland and trained as a nurse in Edinburgh, after which she moved to London to work on Nursing Times. She has previously published fiction and non-fiction, reviews, and has worked in translation and in journalism ( mainly in the Netherlands), from 1979 to 2003. Her memoir, Losing Eric Gill’s Eden, is forthcoming. She Read More
David Belbin has given us the pleasure of another marvellous novel: The Great Deception. After Amazon’s bestseller Bone and Cane and What you don’t know, Belbin strikes again to continue his exciting crime series. In sticking to his roots by placing the setting partially in Nottingham, the author adds a personal touch to this story. Read More
Sarah James’ Plenty-fish cannot be gulped in one go, slipping as it does magnificently around in the imagination, never quite solidly poetry, but fleshy and fresh. The seventy-one-piece collection contains poems of varying lengths – all semi-anecdotal and detailed accounts of everyday life. As a graduate in Modern Languages, James’ sense of poetic form is Read More
In her second piece of crime fiction, and providing a sequel and new story to her 2014 novel Jack in the Box, Hania Allen’s Double Tap sees protagonist Yvonne ‘Von’ Valenti, now a private investigator, faced with a missing person’s case. This instalment offers the intrigue of a murder case being investigated by Von’s former Read More
Family dramas have always provided writers with fertile subjects for comedy or tragedy; witness the grandeur of Shakespeare’s King Lear or the melancholy of Elizabeth Strout’s My name is Lucy Barton, a small gem of a novel longlisted for the same Baileys Prize this year. The Portable Veblen is Elizabeth McKenzie’s exuberant and surreal comic Read More
The factual stories and prose-poems of The Dance at Mociu chronicle Peter Riley’s travels through Transylvania, Romania with their carefully crafted portrayals of the scenery, people, traditions and above all the music of the region. Through diligent wording and description, Riley brings to life a world we almost certainly have never experienced, and assuming we Read More