Canongate Books: 273 books

CLOSE YOUR EYES I invite you to imagine a plan for a new and better society where everything is very coherent and makes a lot of sense and nothing is confusing or awful OPEN YOUR EYES No need to imagine. Here is the plan. The plan is illustrated. The plan is quite complicated. But not too complicated....

In this frank, playful and typically unorthodox collection of essays, Alasdair Gray tells of how his early life experiences influenced his writing, including the creation of those landmarks of literature, Lanark and 1982, Janine. He details the inspirations behind his many acclaimed artworks and murals,...

This is where the novel has a nervous breakdown. Anna Noon is a twenty-year-old student with a taste for perverse sex involving an enigmatic older man and a ventriloquist's dummy. Anna lives in Aberdeen and her sex life revolves around the ancient stone circles in the region.The sublime grandeur of...

‘When I was a child in Scotland, I was fond of everything that was wild, and all my life I've been growing fonder and fonder of wild places and wild creatures.’ John Muir was eleven when he and his family left Scotland in 1849 to build a new life on a homestead in the vast wilderness of Wisconsin....

Edited and introduced by Carol Anderson. ‘I think it is the best Scots romance since The Master of Ballantrae,’ said John Buchan when Flemington was first published in 1911. Violet Jacob’s fifth and finest novel is a tragic drama of the 1745 Jacobite Rising, tightly written, poetic in its symbolic...

Introduced by Isobel Murray and Bob Tait. A leech, a pirate, a predator, an anti-Christ, a public benefactor and the fisherman’s friend; such is Gillespie Strang in this remarkably powerful Scottish novel. Gillespie is the harsh prophet of the new breed of Scottish entrepreneur, prepared to use...

Brilliantly observed and superbly characterised, The Haunted Major recounts the epic golfing match between the outrageously pompous Major and the reigning Open Champion, Jim Lindsay. The prize? The chance to propose to the captivating (and extremely wealthy) Mrs Gunter. Despite being 'the finest sportsman...

Introduced by Jenni Calder. David Balfour is no sooner back in Edinburgh and restored to his estate than he is caught up in the aftermath of the Appin murder. Since he was present when the crime was committed, he knows that the accused, James Stewart, is innocent. Determined to testify on his behalf,...

Edited and introduced by Cairns Craig and Randall Stevenson. Ever since the major revival of dramatic writing and production in the 1970s, the style and the subject matter of Scottish writing for stage and screen has been a continuing influence on our contemporary culture, exciting, offending and...

Things are never dull in the O’Connell family. Still, Fiona, squeezed between her quiet brother and her mischievous line-dancing twin sisters, thinks life in their tenement flat is far less interesting than Emily Bronte’s. But tragedy is not confined to Victorian novels. And life for Fiona in...

Edited by Robin Lorimer, and with a new introduction by James Robertson. The Greek scholar William Lorimer spent the last ten years of his life  working on this project. Each Gospel has a different form of Scots to  match the different forms of Greek used by the various apostles and  scribes, and...

AS HEARD ON RADIO 4 'Utterly wonderful' NINA STIBBE, author of Love, Nina Twenty hours have gone since I last wrote. I have been thinking of you. I shall think of you until I post this, and until you get it. Can you feel, as you read these words, that I am thinking of you now; aglow, alive, alert at...

Beginning with the murder of Abel by his brother, Fallen rewinds through fury and jealousy, lust and despair, right back to the bite from the apple and mankind's first taste of shame. From the bones of this age-old tale, David Maine weaves a compulsively readable and startlingly modern human drama of love, betrayal and rage. We know the end of the story, but how did it really begin?

Introduced by Christopher Harvie. Set against the religious struggles of seventeenth-century Scotland, with Montrose for the king against a convenanted kirk, John Buchan’s Witch Wood is a gripping atmospheric tale in the spirit of Stevenson and Neil Munro. As a moderate Presbyterian minister, young...