Vagabond Voices: 29 books

The referendum is over, but Scotland’s underlying social and economic problems remain, as they have since its brutal deindustrialisation under Thatcher. Jim Sillars sets out the arguments for a second referendum and for an urgent resolution, as the Vow has failed to deliver promised powers, and...

The Garden is about Carl Linnaeus, a leading figure in the Swedish Enlightenment, famous for his taxonomy — a classification of animals and plants that is still used in modern biology. Linnaeus perceives things through his desire to categorise and therefore in relation to other things. His gardener...

Just before the First World War destroyed a generation and divided Europe for almost a century, a farmer in a remote part of Aberdeenshire sat down at the age forty-three to write his thoughts on how to live a good life. Mitchell had a clear, fresh and effective prose style in Standard English, and...

A Nazi war criminal’s son and a Holocaust survivor’s daughter decide to get married in the pleasant, middle-class conformity of sixties Argentina. When the two families come together, Becky’s blind father recognises the voice of the former SS officer, and sets off a chain of events that to varying...

“The separateness of lives once joined appalled him, like the sun dipping behind a black cloud …” How well do we know other people — even when we all belong to a small expat community in a foreign capital? Allan Massie’s edgy and disturbing study of English-speaking alcoholics living in...

Beneath the wit and linguistic trickery of Paul Kavanagh in the company of his trusted Wee Ginger Dug, you’ll find an encyclopaedic knowledge of Scottish politics. Here is political satire in the best tradition. No punches are pulled, and strangely the humour is both brutal and subtle. This collection...

Elspeth Baillie, a young Scottish actress, is chosen by enigmatic impresario Lord Coak for an acting career on the Island of Barbados. At first feted by the colonial gentry, her life in the Caribbean does not go according to plan. Elspeth is obliged to take on a temporary and ambiguous role in the...

In Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Park, the bodies of two youths lie with bullet holes in their heads. Hungover, nicotine-starved and ill-attired, procurator fiscal Maddy Shannon attends the scene, unaware that this grim morning is about to spiral out of control. The corpses have been carefully disfigured,...

With one exception, these short stories were written for this collection, and they tentatively look at different themes such as compassion, passivity and their opposites, which are not, of course, original themes, as none exist. The stories are told in different keys, and some characters appear in...

In the beginning the page was blank and without form, and the scribe sat in front of it, a world forming inside his head. The world grew large, spilling out of him and on to the page. The scribe shaped the world into an island. He named it Fagerö, and populated it with an assortment of likely and...

Procurator fiscal Maddy Shannon awakens in her West End Glasgow flat to a hangover and several mysteries, starting with who is the strange man in her bed? Shortly after discovering the man’s identity, Maddy learns that his boss, a successful defence lawyer, met a gruesome end in his posh Merchant...

William Templeton is awoken from his dead life as an alcoholic by the murder of his mother. He has no memory of when he last visited her, and no sense of what their relationship might have been. He feels the need to reacquaint himself with the world: he stops drinking and embarks upon the long convalescence...

Nicky plays the drums. He plays at church — softly. Friday nights he goes to the youth club there. For the rest of the week he serves his time at school, quietly and anonymously. One Sunday morning he meets Sid. Fresh from an onstage tussle with an elderly music teacher, Sid needs a new drummer...

Douglas Low has reached the last slice of life. Recovering from a heart condition, he retires to a cottage on Holy Loch, his hope that this final bite might be a sweet one. For Edith, his invalid wife, the only wish is that new shores might bring relief from bitter, chronic pain. Douglas finds respite...