Reviews
Living in a lighthouse is a novel experience
The Lighthouse Keepers is an inspirational and light-hearted novel that follows Max, an aspiring young musician. The novel is set in the west coast of Scotland, making many of the places mentioned recognisable to local readers. Anderson is able to bring to life, with vivid descriptions, the enchanting music that Max creates drawing emotional responses…
Read MoreA love affair with wild life and the barn owl
Jim Crumley is one of the country’s premier wildlife writers and this small but perfectly formed book shows why. The writer looks back on his ethereal encounters with the barn owl and its aptly heart-shaped face, which he has always cherished as part of his life-long affiliation with nature. Even living in Dundee as a…
Read MoreA classic piece of writing from Sir Walter Scott
The Lady of the Lake is a vivid and gripping tale of deception, romance and mystery told with the backdrop of some of Scotland’s most breathtaking scenery. It emphasises the vivid language used by Sir Walter Scott. The Lady of the Lake signified the peak of Scott’s reputation as a poet and was a sensation…
Read MoreA chance meeting changed her life forever
Sasha Roseberry’s life isn’t as exciting as she had imagined it when a teenager, in Leap Year: A Time to Remember. Her job in the Five-Plus-The-One shop, traipsing round the isles and selling discounted, substandard products, only just pays her bills, regardless of her steady rise to a management position over the years. Then a…
Read MoreA carefully curated collection of summer writing
Carefully selected by Melissa Harrison, this anthology has been put together to capture the spirit of summer. The physical wonders are captured through the writings of well-known authors such as Charles Dickens, George Elliott and Edward Step, to name a few, and together they form a collection which reconnects the reader with the natural world.…
Read MoreMagical tales from ancient Scots mythology
The Old Grey Magician is a compilation of short stories featuring Fionn and his crowd of men (the Fianna) and his poet son, Ossian. The Old Grey Magician is a mystical figure who frequently appears throughout Celtic mythology, often taking on different forms and shapeshifting. This book is one of the first collections featuring a…
Read MoreA terrifying look into a fictional tomorrow
Lie of the Land, the debut novel from Michael F Russell, is set in a post-apocalyptic dystopian Scotland in the not-so-distant future. An authoritarian government is in place, with all that entails. Internet development has increased to such an extent as to allow the powers that be to be able to control minds – the…
Read MoreAn epic tale set during the time of Culloden
Surrey-born author Kimberley Jordan Reeman has created an epic 782-page book that is not for the faint hearted. Set in Scotland in 1746 during the bloody military occupation of the Highlands, gut-wrenching atrocities set a distinctly dark tone from the outset. But when English soldier Mordaunt saves an infant from the horrors of 18th-century rebellion,…
Read MoreThe tragic story of a Scots soldier – in his own words
So many Scottish families have their own stories from World Wars I and II. This is the biography of Charles Grant Tennant, a pacifist who joined the Army at the outbreak of the Great War and died in May 1915. Cumbrae-based Fergus Boyle has assembled a fascinating first-hand account of the life of his great-uncle,…
Read MoreDetective solving a murder crime back in time
Seventeenth-century detective duo MacKenzie and Scougall are asked by a Highland clan to solve a case, after a young lawyer’s body is found near Edinburgh. Their investigations are set against the political turmoil of the time, with Jacobite rebels and Bonnie Dundee, as they try to fi nd out just who wanted Aeneas MacLeod dead.…
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