Deemed by publisher Freight Books as a ‘vital analysis of the state of the nation following the SNP surge at the 2015 general election’, Iain Macwhirter’s Tsunami: Scotland’s Democratic Revolution is a unique insight into the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum and its aftermath. Considering Macwhirter’s first-hand experience in the political arena (his work as a 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
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
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
A creative project such as VERSschmuggel, of which this book is the offspring, is a remarkable thing. Funded by Literaturwerkstatt Berlin for the 2014 Berlin Poetry Festival, four Scottish and two Scotland-based poets spent time in Berlin with six German counterparts. With considerable assistance from translators, they paired to transform each other’s work into an Read More
Russell Jones’s collection, The Green Dress Whose Girl is Sleeping is much about the serendipitous little moments in life as it is about the huge losses. His constantly changing style enables this; he moves from haiku to couplets in the same way his poems move from quiet moments outside chip shops to moments of contemplation Read More
Having missed hearing Linda Cracknell’s recent offerings on Radio 4, I was delighted to have the chance to review the book. Doubling Back is an account of ten walks undertaken by the author, in the footsteps of various famous writers as well as those of her own relations. These take place all over the world: Read More
With her debut novel Jack in the Box, Hania Allen makes her pitch for a place in the highly competitive crime fiction genre. Set at the turn of the millennium, the novel follows DCI Yvonne ‘Von’ Valenti as she attempts to solve a murder which harks back to a number of unsolved cases from 1985 Read More
Travelling on the train to Glasgow, I dug around in my bag and found my copy of Douglas Lindsay’s The Legend of Barney Thomson. The cover brandishes the phrase “now a major motion picture”, so it must be a good read, right? A brand new book, I timidly opened the rigid cover, careful not to Read More
Killochries has been termed Jim Carruth’s first full collection which is possibly unintentionally misleading. Five chapbooks, an illustrated fable and numerous awards lie between this and his already assured debut Bovine Pastoral. The inside cover’s description of a “verse novella” is considerably more accurate. This is a narrative, yet Killochries is neither quite a single Read More