Canongate Books imprint: 217 books

Edited by Andrew Noble and Patrick Scott Hogg. The Canongate Burns is the most comprehensive and challenging edition of the poems and songs of Robert Burns ever published. Drawing on extensive scholarship and the poet’s own inimitable letters, this definitive edition offers a wealth of information...

The first sixteen tales in this collection were published by Canongate in 1983 with the title Unlikely Stories, Mostly. This collection also has fifty-seven tales from later books, plus sixteen new ones written for the hardback publication of this collection. This last section, Tales Droll and Plausible,...

Edited and Introduced by WEK Anderson. ‘I have all my life regretted that I did not keep a regular [journal]. I have myself lost recollection of much that was interesting and I have deprived my family and the public of some curious information by not carrying this resolution into effect.’ Sunday,...

‘Forty is a fine age, a young, strong powerful, prime-of-life age, a frisky age, a coming-to-maturity age when all things are possible. But beware, it is also an apocalyptic number, a number full of climactic warnings' - Margaret Drabble. 40 is a truly meaningful and fascinating number. For example,...

Edited and introduced by Valentina Bold. This selection of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s writing brings together old favourites and new material for the first time. There are all his lively contributions to Scottish Scene (co-written by Hugh MacDiarmid) including the unforgettable lilt and flow of his short...

‘Too clever for its own good in parts, but otherwise a damned good read.’ Col. Sebastian Moran in the Simla Times ‘This anthology may be likened to a vast architectural folly imblending the idioms of the Greek, Gothic, Oriental, Baroque, Scottish Baronial and Bauhaus schools. Like one who, absently...

Introduced by Giles Gordon. Elspeth Davie is one of Scotland’s finest and most underrated short-story writers. Her prose style is as clear and occasionally unnerving as that of Muriel Spark, yet her work reveals a gentler and more compassionate, but no less penetrating eye for the beauty and the...

Edited by his children, Giles and Victoria, Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks is an anthology of writing from the former editor of Punch and Radio 4 national treasure Alan Coren, who died in October 2007. In a prolific forty-year career Alan Coren wrote for The Times, Observer, Tatler, Daily Mail, Mail...

'Timeless, funny and utterly absorbing' HILARY MANTEL In April 1925 at the age of fifteen, Jean Lucey Pratt started a journal that she kept until just a few days before her death in 1986, producing over a million words in 45 exercise books. What emerges is a portrait of a truly unique, spirited woman...

The stories that shape our children's lives are too important to be left to chance. With The Story Cure, bibliotherapists Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin have put together the perfect manual for grown-ups who want to initiate young readers into one of life's greatest pleasures. There's a remedy for...

Alasdair Gray is Scotland's best known polymath. Born in 1934 in Glasgow, he graduated in design and mural art from the Glasgow School of Art in 1957. After decades of surviving by painting and writing TV and radio plays, his first novel, the loosely autobiographical, blackly fantastic Lanark, opened...

FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOKS OF 2017 It is four years since the virus came, killing every adult in its path. Not long after that the electricity failed. Food and water started running out. Fires raged uncontrolled across the country. Now Anna cares for her brother alone in a house hidden in the woods,...

Kit, a work-obsessed literature student, decides on a whim to go to a dance class. And for a while it looks like Joe, the shadowy figure she meets there, may tempt her to put her books aside and live a little. But as Joe’s world becomes increasingly threatening and Kit’s research leads her to stumble...

'Probably the greatest novel of the century' Observer 'Remarkable . . . A work of loving and vivid imagination, yielding copious riches' WILLIAM BOYD Lanark, a modern vision of hell, is set in the disintegrating cities of Unthank and Glasgow, and tells the interwoven stories of Lanark and Duncan Thaw....