Birlinn: 208 books

The East Neuk of Fife may seem like an unusual place for a musical revolution. However, in amongst the sleepy fishing villages and rolling fields, a small community of gifted musicians has quietly crept up on the world. From psychedelic troubadours the Beta Band to the mult-million-selling KT Tunstall,...

Glasgow, April 1820. The last armed uprising on British soil, intent on severing the Union and establishing a radical Scottish republic, ended in executions, imprisonments, transportations and 85 trails for high treason. Yet despite its political and social importance, the story of this working-class...

This lucid account of crofting life during the second World War has been a popular classic since its first publication in 1949. One of very few books available on Moidart in the north-west of Scotland, it evokes the enchanted, magical beauty of this much-loved area of the country. Margaret Leigh was...

Mary Shelley's 1818 novel, "Frankenstein", introduced readers around the world to the concept of raising the dead through scientific procedures. Those who read the book were thrilled by this incredible Gothic adventure. Few, however, realised that Shelley's story had a basis in fact. What...

From the Ice Age to the recent Scottish Referendum, historian and author Alistair Moffat explores the history of the Scottish nation. As well as focusing on key moments in the nation's history such as the Battle of Bannockburn and the Jacobite Risings, Moffat also features other episodes in history...

After joining the the Lovat Scouts at the outbreak of the Second World War Donald Angus Gillies is sent on a mission to the Alps, where he meetsFrancoise, a young French Canadian SOE agent. The pair immediately form a close bond, but when Francoise is injured and captured, DA realizeshis feelings...

In this book Ian Crofton makes a journey on foot from Gretna Green in the southwest to Berwick in the northeast, following as close as possible the Anglo-Scottish Border as it has been fixed since the union of the crowns in 1603. Much of the line of the Border runs through a wild, overwhelmingly unvisited...

In the 1940s, the eminent British botanist John Heslop Harrison proposed a controversial theory: that vegetation on the islands off the west coast of Scotland had survived the last Ice Age. His premise flew in the face of what most botanists believed - that no plants had survived the 10,000-year period...

Every year, ten men from Ness, at the northern tip of the Isle of Lewis, sail north-east for some forty miles to a remote rock called Sulasgeir. Their mission is to catch and harvest the guga; the almost fully grown gannet chicks nesting on the two hundred foot high cliffs that circle the tiny island,...

A comedian, singer, composer, musician, linguist, actor, author and a favourite of Sean Connery and Billy Connolly's, Norman MacLean is a living legend in the Gaelic world. Based in the Uists in the Outer Hebrides, with side trips to Glasgow, Hamburg and Amsterdam, this dotty adventure embraces frustrated...

Abdul Wahab, an Afghan science teacher, is eagerly anticipating the arrival of his British fiancee, Laura Johnstone, in the capital of his home country. Having met while Abdul was a student at Manchester University, the couple are eager to settle down in Isban. However, Abdul is not the only one interested...

By the time of his death in January 1996, Norman MacCaig was known widely as the grand old man of Scottish poetry, honoured by an OBE and the Queen's Medal for Poetry. This book is a celebration of MacCaig's life - 2010 is the hundredth anniversary of his birth - and it features 100 of his best poems, edited by his son Ewen.

Lewisman Donald S Murray tells in his inimitable verse and prose Stornoway's story from the days when Mesolithic people sheltered there to its present-day life as a bustling, modern harbour, casting light on men and boats, native herring girls and island visitors, the town's triumphs and tragedies....

"Sick Heart River" is John Buchan's most powerful novel and his last, completed days before his death. It was published posthumously in 1941. Buchan's rich descriptions of the rugged Canadian Northwest Territories are influenced by his real-life voyage down the Mackenzie River in 1937. At...