Tom Hubbard(Grace Note Publications, 2020); pbk: £7.99 The Devil and Michael Scott: A Gallimaufry of Fife and Beyond (2020) is the latest insightful offering from Tom Hubbard. In this intriguing collection of poems, essays and a stage play, Hubbard offers us a wonderful jumble of Fife, its history and its people. The famous polymath and Read More
‘Antlers of Water’—the phrase is MacCaig’s—and for several reasons it’s an apt title for this new anthology of ‘Writing on the Nature and Environment of Scotland’. That craggy map. A land that is as much water, as land. Those antlers, perfectly seen by the poet, delve deeply into what it is to live in Scotland. Read More
At its simplest, established writer Frank Woods’ debut novel Where the Bridge Lies is a melodramatic detective story. It features revelatory deathbed confessions, long-lost relatives, a femme fatale, a mysterious commune and even an investigative journalist for a protagonist. But beneath this sensationalist exterior lies a deeper rumination on time, trauma and the ties that Read More
With this moving and poetic novel, full of the rhythms of Gaelic and Doric, Donald Murray has created both a memorial and a song of love, grief and lament, reflected in the windswept landscapes of the Isle of Lewis. Narrated by Alasdair Cruikshank, retired Glasgow art teacher, grandson of Tormod Morrison, a fictional survivor of Read More
We step out of Tonic into the stream of pedestrians on Nethergate looking for just the right place to talk. By tacit agreement, we pass up Dundee Contemporary Arts and look in on the Phoenix; but Duncan McLean tows me along. I’m conscious we are drifting too far away from the engagement McLean needs to Read More
The inimitable Alastair McIntosh in Conversation with Kirsty Gunn (of Writing Practice and Study at the University of Dundee) on writing, walking, camping kit, travel, islands, fairies and manifestations of the divine.
The poet Jim Stewart (1952-2016) earned that rarest of writer’s accolades: of being well-loved by those who not only knew his work but knew him. He had a well-deserved reputation as a gifted and inspiring teacher who, in typical Dundonian fashion, seemed to hide his calling under a genuine sense of duty, so that his Read More
Bone Deep is a taut, psychological thriller which cleverly threads themes of love, betrayal and revenge through parallel stories. The title, like that of Sandra Ireland’s debut novel, Beneath the Skin, conveys her fascination with the inner world: what compels people to act, and how their actions subsequently affect their psyche. Mac, a retired academic, suffering Read More
