January 25th is Burns Night so here at Parade’s End we will be pouring a wee dram, tucking into the tatties and neeps and settling in with a good book. Here are 9 of our favourites set in Scotland or by Scottish authors.
A Heart Full of Headstones by Ian Rankin
John Rebus stands accused: the once legendary detective is on trial, facing the rest of his life behind bars.
How does a hero turn villain?
Or have times changed, and the rules with them?
Detective Inspector Siobhan Clarke tackles Edinburgh’s most explosive case in years, as a corrupt cop harbouring huge secrets goes missing.
But is her loyalty to the police or the public? And who can she trust when nobody is truly innocent – including her former mentor Rebus – and a killer walks among them?
As the time comes to choose sides, it becomes clear: after a lifetime of lies, the truth will break your heart…
One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson
It is summer, it is the Edinburgh Festival.
People queuing for a lunchtime show witness a road-rage incident – a near-homicidal attack which changes the lives of everyone involved.
Jackson Brodie, ex-army, ex-police, ex-private detective, is also an innocent bystander – until he becomes a murder suspect.
As the body count mounts, each member of the teeming Dickensian cast’s story contains a kernel of the next, like a set of nesting Russian dolls.
They are all looking for love or money or redemption or escape: but what each actually discovers is their own true self.
The Bookseller of Inverness by S.G. Maclean
After Culloden, Iain MacGillivray was left for dead on Drummossie Moor. Wounded, his face brutally slashed, he survived only by pretending to be dead as the Redcoats patrolled the corpses of his Jacobite comrades.
Six years later, with the clan chiefs routed and the Highlands subsumed into the British state, Iain lives a quiet life, working as a bookseller in Inverness. One day, after helping several of his regular customers, he notices a stranger lurking in the upper gallery of his shop, poring over his collection. But the man refuses to say what he’s searching for and only leaves when Iain closes for the night.
The next morning Iain opens up shop and finds the stranger dead, his throat cut, and the murder weapon laid out in front of him – a sword with a white cockade on its hilt, the emblem of the Jacobites. With no sign of the killer, Iain wonders whether the stranger discovered what he was looking for – and whether he paid for it with his life. He soon finds himself embroiled in a web of deceit and a series of old scores to be settled in the ashes of war.
The Last Witch of Scotland by Philip Paris
Being a woman was her only crime.
Scottish Highlands, 1727.
In the aftermath of a tragic fire that kills her father, Aila and her mother, Janet, move to the remote parish of Loth, north-west of Inverness. Blending in does not come easily to the women: Aila was badly burned in the fire and left with visible injuries, while her mother struggles to maintain her grip on reality. When a temporary minister is appointed in the area, rather than welcome the two women, he develops a strange curiosity for them that sets them even further apart from the community.
Then arrives a motley troupe of travelling entertainers from Edinburgh, led by the charismatic but mysterious Jack. It is just the distraction Janet, and particularly Aila, needs: for the first time in a long while, their lives are filling with joy and friendship, and a kind of hope Aila hasn’t known since her father’s death. But in this small community, faith is more powerful than truth, and whispers more dangerous even than fire.
Haunting and deeply moving, The Last Witch of Scotland is a story of love, loyalty and sacrifice, inspired by the true story of the last person to be executed for witchcraft in Britain.
1989.
The world is on the brink of revolution and journalist Allie Burns is a woman on a mission.
When she discovers a lead about the exploitation of society’s most vulnerable, Allie is determined to investigate and give voice to the silenced.
Elsewhere, a ticking clock begins the countdown to a murder.
As Allie begins to connect the dots and edges closer to exposing the truth, it is more shocking than she ever imagined.
There’s nothing like a killer story, and to tell it, Allie must risk her freedom and her life . . .
A Song of Comfortable Chairs by Alexander McCall Smith
THE ONE WHERE MMA POTOKWANI SAVES THE DAY
Grace Makutsi’s husband, Phuti, is in a bind. An international firm is attempting to undercut his prices in the office furniture market.
To make matters worse, they have a slick new advertising campaign that seems hard to beat. Nonetheless, with Mma Ramotswe’s help, Phuti comes up with a campaign that may just do the trick.
Meanwhile, Mma Makutsi is approached by an old friend who has a troubled son. Grace and Phuti agree to lend a hand, but the boy proves difficult to reach, and the situation is more than they can handle on their own.
It will require not only all of their patience and dedication, but also the help of Mma Ramotswe and the formidable Mma Potokwani.
The Long Knives by Irvine Welsh
In Edinburgh, Detective Inspector Ray Lennox is investigating a brutal crime…
Ritchie Gulliver MP is dead.
Castrated and left to bleed in an empty Leith warehouse. Vicious, racist and corrupt, many thought he had it coming. But nobody could have predicted this.
After the life Gulliver has led, the suspects are many – corporate rivals, political opponents, the countless groups he’s offended.
And the vulnerable and marginalised, who bore the brunt of his cruelty.
As Lennox unravels the truth, and the list of shocking attacks grows, he must put his personal feelings aside. But one question refuses to go away: who are the real victims here?
One man, many lives. Born in 1799, Cashel Greville Ross experiences myriad lives: joyous and devastating, years of luck and unexpected loss. Moving from County Cork to London, from Waterloo to Zanzibar, Cashel seeks his fortune across continents in war and in peace.
He faces a terrible moral choice in a village in Sri Lanka as part of the East Indian Army. He enters the world of the Romantic Poets in Pisa. In Ravenna he meets a woman who will live in his heart for the rest of his days.
As he travels the world as a soldier, a farmer, a felon, a writer, a father, a lover, he experiences all the vicissitudes of life and, through the accelerating turbulence of the nineteenth century, he discovers who he truly is. This is the romance of life itself, and the beating heart of The Romantic. From one of Britain’s best-loved and bestselling writers comes an intimate yet panoramic novel set across the nineteenth century.
‘A story is never an answer. A story is always a question.’
Here we are in extraordinary times. Is this history? What happens when we cease to trust governments, the media, each other? What have we lost? What stays with us? What does it take to unlock our future? Following her astonishing quartet of Seasonal novels, Ali Smith again lights a way for us through the nightmarish now, in a vital celebration of companionship in all its forms.