Tag Archives: Scottish author

Whispers in the Graveyard by Theresa Breslin – Carnegie Medal winner

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Whispers in the Graveyard Book CoverWhispers in the Graveyard by the Scottish author Theresa Breslin won the Carnegie Medal in 1994.

In this book the author writes about a multiple of serious problems that Solomon, the main character has to deal with. He is having trouble at school, and at home. His mother has just recently left the family home after having given Solomon a choice of staying with his father or leaving with her. He stays with his father mainly because with his mother leaving there will be nobody to look after his father when he goes on his frequent alcoholic binges. But it means that Solomon doesn’t even have clean clothes to wear, so he’s smelly and unpopular at school. His teacher Mr Frame particularly dislikes him and chooses to ridicule him in the classroom, he’s just a bully. Peter, his best friend tries to protect Solomon from Frame, and lets Solly copy his homework, but he spends less and less time at school, choosing to hide away in an old graveyard.

He has found a sort of hidey-hole that he can gain access to by climbing up a rowan tree, used in the past for keeping witches away of course. When Solomon sees strangers looking around the graveyard he realises that his peaceful haven is under threat. With work going on in the graveyard it looks like something evil has been released.

It seems that this is one of those love it or hate it books. It’s really well written, but if you don’t like a bit of spookiness, or the real problems that some youngsters have in their lives such as bullying, family break up, alcoholic parents AND dyslexia then you might want to give this one a miss. However it’s a sad fact that a lot of young people have to cope with terrible problems that would fell many an adult. So although this isn’t exactly a jolly read, I think it might have helped some readers along the way. I enjoyed it, it has some light-hearted moments.

Kenilworth by Sir Walter Scott

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It took me a week to finish Kenilworth, it’s 568 pages long, my edition dates from 1908, it was a prize given to my granny-in-law for ‘general exellence’ at St Gabriel’s Church in Govan. I wonder if she ever ploughed her way through it, she was a big Georgette Heyer fan. The book was originally published in 1821.

I can’t say that I enjoyed this one. I usually get used to Walter Scott’s garrulous writing style fairly quickly but this one felt like a real drag.

The setting is mainly Kenilworth Castle which was owned by Robert Dudley (Earl of Leicester) Elizabeth I of England’s favourite. The whole thing is just Walter Scott’s version of what went on in that Tudor court where men were jockeying for Elizabeth’s attention in an attempt to climb the greasy pole and maybe even become her husband.

Dudley thinks he has a good chance of catching Elizabeth but crucially he is already married to Amy Robsart, although it is a secret marriage. Obviously things don’t end well for Amy.

There’s a lot more to it of course, I don’t think that it helped that I already knew how the story would end. I don’t think I’ll darken Scott’s door for quite some time – if ever.

I would really like to visit Kenilworth Castle sometime though, meanwhile I’m making do with this You Tube video with historian Dan Snow.

 

The Other Side of Stone by Linda Cracknell

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The Other Side of Stone by Linda Cracknell was published in 2021 by Taproot Press. The time switches between 1831, 1913, 1990, 2003, 2006 and 2019, but it’s never confusing. It’s a quick read at just 146 pages, I think it’s really well written. The setting is rural Perthshire. It is a novella although some people have described it as a collection of linked short stories.

It begins with a stonemason cutting the keystone of a Perthshire woollen mill, he chisels the date 1831 into it, but on the inside face that nobody will ever see he carves a secret mark.

Basically this is the history of a building over the years, from its beginning to its end. We often say when we’re in old buildings “if walls could talk” and that’s really what Linda Cracknell has done in this book. The woollen mill has seen strikes and strife particularly in 1913 when they are so disgruntled that immigration to Canada seems like a good move to some. But the wife of one of the mill workers just hopes to get her husband to sign papers to allow her to be able to train as a nurse, she needs his permission and it looks like he’s never going to give it. She becomes a suffragette which gains her husband a lot of sympathy  – from the drunken men anyway.

In the later years the mill’s fortunes decline, as almost all of them did, until the land it was built on is returned to an agricultural use again, and a circle of some sort has been completed.

 

 

 

The Camomile by Catherine Carswell

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The Camomile by the Scottish author Catherine Carswell was first published in 1922 but it has just been reprinted by British Library in their Women Writers series.

The blurb on the back of this book says: Set in early twentieth-century Glasgow, this effervescent novel is widely considered a fictional counterpart to Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘A Room of Ones’s Own’. In fact this book predates that essay by quite a few years.

Ellen Carstairs lives with her brother Ronald and her Aunt Harry who is a keen Christian, but Ellen gets no peace at home to do the writing that she wants to do. She is having to give piano lessons to help out financially, but worse than that her aunt is always coming in and out of her room to chat, and to try to persaude her to go to the very many religious meetings that she attends.

Ellen’s solution to the problem is to rent a room just off Byres Road in Glasgow’s west end, supposedly as a place to teach her pupils but really as a refuge from her aunt, and to get on with her writing, she has great ambition.

The book begins with a letter to her friend Ruby, they had spent time together studying music in Germany, after that it moves on to journal in style. Ellen moves from a not long out of school girl, writing of the crushes she had had on teachers to a young woman contemplating her future and weighing up her options. After a bit of a whirlwind romance and engagement some red flags have been spotted by her and it seems that she’ll have to think again.

This was a bit of a slow start for me but I ended up really loving it, there is some Glaswegian in it but really not much at all and it’s very easily understood I think. There’s quite a bit of humour as Ellen is a close observer of those around her, and the middle class society of Glasgow was quite a rich seam.

The Camomile has an interesting Afterword by Simon Thomas of  the blog Stuck in a Book.

I was sent a copy of this book by British Library, for review. I appreciated their Mackintosh – ish book cover design.

 

 

 

 

Night Fires by Joan Lingard – 20 Books of Summer 2024

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Night Fires by the Scottish author Joan Lingard was first published by Hamish Hamilton in 1993. It was obviously influenced by the political unrest and revolutions which were going on around the late 1980s, particularly the fall of the Romanian Ceausescu regime.  It’s one of my 20 Books of Summer.

Lara and Nik are teenagers who live in an orphanage on the outskirts of town. The orphanage is run by an evil man and woman that they nickname Dracula and The Crow. When Nik and Lara see that they are loading up their vehicle with as much stuff as they can it’s obvious that Dracula and The Crow intend to leave the orphanage, fearing for their lives. They can see and smell that mobs have set the city on fire, the people have had enough, they’ve snapped and they’re fighting back, hoping to rid themselves of the brutal and suffocating dictatorship that they’ve been living under.

Lara and Nik decide to see what’s going on for themselves and Bibi, a woman who works in the orphanage  gives them the address of her sister in the city, they can go to her if they find themselves in trouble – which they do.

This is a good read, aimed at young teenagers I think.

 

 

 

Hop Scot by Catriona McPherson

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Hop Scot by Catriona McPherson (Last Ditch series) was published by Severn House (Canongate Books) in 2023. I picked this one up recently from the New Arrivals shelf in my local library. I enjoyed the author’s previous Dandy Gilver series which is set in the 1920s/30s. This series is contemporary and unfortunately I’ve found it rather late because when I started to read it I realised that this one is sixth in the series, but I don’t think it’s really necessary to read them in order, although I wish I had.

Lexy Campbell is living in California but she’s travelling to Scotland to spend Christmas with her parents, and the Last Ditch Motel extended family is accompanying her. They’ve never been to Scotland before and they’re all geared up to spend their time in Dundee, but there has been a last minute change of plan and they all end up being driven to the pretty village of Yule not far from Edinburgh to spend Christmas at Mistletoe Hall. Lexy’s parents have bought it intending to run it as a posh B&B – after a lot of refurbishment.

This is a good mystery with lots of humour and quirky characters. I’ll have to go back to the beginning of the series though to get to know them all better. A lot of the humour revolves around the differences between American and Scottish society.

The blurb on the back says: Deadly secrets, berry rustlers, skeletons and a snowy Christmas Eve in the booze aisle at Tesco; the last Ditch crew won’t forget their Scottish holiday in a hurry.

On balance I preferred the Dandy Gilver series, for the setting.

Dissolution by C.J. Sansom – 20 Books of Summer 2024

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Dissolution by C.J. Sansom was first published in 2003 and it’s the first book that I’ve read by the author, in fact it was only when I read his Guardian obituary when he died in April that I realised that I had almost certainly missed out on some really good reads. I think I did borrow one of his Shardlake books from the library before, but realised that it was part of a series, but never did get around to getting the first one, until now. I really enjoyed it.

The setting is England in 1537. It’s the year after Anne Boleyn’s execution and Henry VIII is beginning to dismantle the large network of monasteries that have managed to accumulate huge riches over the years. Henry is determined to strip them of their wealth and Thomas Cromwell has sent a young man to St Donatus Monastery to investigate their finances, but he is found dead there, he has been beheaded in the kitchen, and Cromwell sends Matthew Shardlake and his young apprentice to investigate the murder.

When they start to question the monks they soon realise that they are very far from being holy men, or even good men, the place is awash with sin, but which of them is a murderer?

This is an atmospheric read with a long snowstorm adding to the sense of menace as the monastery turns into a prison for Shardlake and his apprentice, trapped with  a murderer on the loose.

This was another of my 20 Books of Summer.

 

The Fall of Kelvin Walker by Alasdair Gray – 20 Books of Summer

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The Fall of Kelvin Walker by the Scottish author Alasdair Gray was first published by Canongate Publishing in 1985. It’s a very short read at just 140 pages. It’s one of my 20 Books of Summer.

Kelvin Walker has left his home town of Glaik, a bit of a rural backwater, for the bright lights of swinging London of the 1960s. He’s determined to make a success of his life in double quick time, despite having no qualifications, he has only worked in his father’s shop since the age of 15. He had discovered the local library in Glaik and had been impressed with Nietsche who had released him from his fear of God as he didn’t exist, an entity that Kelvin felt had watched his every move, just as his father did.

Kelvin plans to pretend that he is Hector McKellar, the one person from Glaik who has become famous, he works in television. He hopes that the name will get him interviews and that he’ll be able to blag his way into a well-paid position.

Kelvin has terrific confidence in his abilities, but he quickly realises that life in London is very alien to anything he has experienced before. He’s saved from having to sleep on a park bench by a young woman who takes him back to the room that she shares with her boyfriend who is an artist. They’re bemused by Kelvin’s plans, he just doesn’t know how things work, but Kelvin is undaunted.

I’ve read a few books by Gray over the years, this is the one that I’ve enjoyed most, it’s described as being Calvinist slapstick. If you add the letters ‘it’ to Glaik you get the Scots word glaikit which means idiot, foolish.

The blurb on the back says:

‘The first major Scottish writer since Walter Scott’ – Anthony Burgess

‘Gray’s work is bawdy and exuberant. Here is an original and talented writer plainly in his prime’ – Robert Nye in the Guardian.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Redemption of Alexander Seaton by Shona MacLean – 20 Books of Summer

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The Redemption of Alexander Seaton by Shona MacLean  (S.G. MacLean) was first published in 2008. It’s one of my 20 Books of Summer.

The setting is the town of Banff, Scotland in 1626. It’s 10 o’clock at night and two whores are searching the pockets of a man that they have found lying in the street, but they find nothing. When they realise that the man is ill, not just drunk, they drag him to the schoolhouse where the teacher lives, hoping that he will be able to help the man, but they didn’t stay to speak to the teacher, they were worried about getting involved. In the morning the man is found dead, and it seems he must have been poisoned.

The teacher – Alexander Seaton – had trained for the ministry, but he had been denounced as a sinner, unfit for the job, when the dead body was found he was obviously going to be under suspicion.

Seaton sets about investigating the death, it’s a time of witch hunts and extreme religious fervour, a dangerous mixture.  I really enjoyed this one, it is very atmospheric. Maps feature in the storyline, apparently at that time maps were rare and most people had never seen one, so anyone in possession of one is suspect. I must admit that it’s something I hadn’t really thought about

The Bookseller of Inverness by S.G. MacLean

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The Bookseller of Inverness by S.G. MacLean was published in 2022, I found it to be a cracking read, in fact it would make a great film.

Iain MacGillivray had been one of the many Jacobites on Drumossie Moor, Culloden in 1746, and one of the few to get away with his life, although badly wounded, he had feigned death.  It was a terrible time with the Redcoats running amok, pillaging, killing the wounded, and generally causing mayhem and despair within the local communities as they raped and murdered. Six years on and Iain has a bookshop in Inverness where he just wants to put it all behind him, and have nothing to do with the Jacobite cause. But the cause comes to him.

A mystery customer comes to his bookshop, he’s searching for a particular book but refusing to give any information at all, he’s going through all the books one by one. At the end of the day Iain has to practically throw the stranger out so that he can shut the shop, but when he opens it up the next morning he finds the stranger dead, his throat had been cut by a sword with a white cockade on its hilt – a Jacobite symbol.

Iain is surprised to discover that his Jacobite sympathies have resurfaced, and the behaviour of most of the Redcoats in the local barracks only strengthens his feelings.  Someone is settling scores, and it transpires that there’s another Jacobite plot afoot.

This was apparently a Times Audio Book of the Week with the comment that ‘This slice of historical fiction takes you on a wild ride.’

If you do read any books by S.G. (Shona) MacLean you should make sure that you read the Author’s notes at the end of the book. They’re always fascinating, her family background is steeped in the Scottish Highlands, where she still lives, and her uncle was the thriller writer Alistair MacLean. Shona MacLean obviously takes after him.