Canongate Books: 273 books

The year is 1859. Edward Scales is a businessman, a butterfly collector, a respectable man. He is the man Gwen Carrick fell in love with one windswept day on a beach in Cornwall. Seven years later he is dead and Gwen is on trial for his murder. From country house drawing rooms to the rainforests of...

Introduced by John Burns. This is the world of universal future war. Faced with the threat of bombs, bacteriological warfare and poison gas, a married couple whose pacifism compels them to opt out of ‘civilisation’, take to the hills to live as fugitives in the wild. Plainly and simply told, Wild...

Introduced by Margery Palmer McCulloch. In writing Just Duffy, a novel set amidst the urban decay of Lanarkshire, Robin Jenkins has created a modern-day Confession of a Justified Sinner. Convinced of his own rectitude, appalled at the moral squalor around him, Duffy declares war on society. Ridiculous,...

For a brief moment in 1940 the lives of a young Spanish militant and a reclusive academic of German and Jewish heritage are thrown together. Along with thousands of others across Europe, both men have fled their homeland in the face of fascist persecution. Yet, until the day their paths converge on a...

In the aftermath of the Great War, Non Davies wakes one morning to find her husband crouching underneath the kitchen table in a cold sweat, shouldering an imaginary rifle. What has changed her Davey so completely? A clue arrives inside a mysterious letter, which takes her to London in search of the...

In 1911, in the Scottish Border village of Sprouston, the young parish minister wrote to the Daily Mail for entry forms for its sweet pea competition.The top prize was a staggering £1000 and organisers predicted that as many as 15,000 would enter. He could not foretell that the paper's estimate of the...

STILL FRIENDS A DECADE ON? WHAT ARE THE CHANCES? For a while, Ian, Lauren and Paul shared the same friends, the same university, the same dreams and the same potential. Ten years on they are worlds apart. Call centres, charity shops and bedrooms that smell like cabbage were never part of the plan....

Cuff College of Transgression and Pathology, Oxford. The quiet of the evening is shattered by the discovery of a Body In The Library. The police are Baffled. Tom Hurst, a junior lecturer at the College, breaking every rule of the whodunnit genre, follows a trail of arcane clues that leads him to Botswana...

One glance at Now and Then and it becomes evident that this is not merely a collection of a songwriter's lyrics. The song-poems of this undisputed "bluesologist" triumphantly stand on their own, evoking the rhythm and urgency which have distinguished Gil Scott-Heron's career. This, the first...

This award-winning story collection summons all the laughter, darkness and intensity of contemporary Irish life. A pair of fast girls court trouble as they cool their heels on a slow night in a small town. Lonesome hillwalkers take to the high reaches in pursuit of a saving embrace. A bewildered man...

Humans have been making lists for even longer than they've been writing letters. They are the shorthand for what really matters to us: our hopes and aspirations; likes and dislikes; rules for living and loving; records of our memories and reminders of the things we want to do before we die. Just as...

It is Scotland in the early eighteenth century. Fear and superstition grip the land. Robert Wringhim, a boy of strict Calvinist upbringing, is corrupted by a shadowy figure who calls himself Gil-Martin. Under his influence Robert commits a series of murders which he regards as 'justified' by God under...

A classic of short fiction, Alan Spence’s celebrated debut collection, first published in 1977, brings Glasgow to vibrant life and captures the spirit of the city as it teetered on the brink of change. From childhood Christmases in small tenement flats and games played on scrubland, to Orange Walks...

In this passionate and heartfelt book, Richard Holloway interrogates the traditional ways of understanding the Bible. In doing so he demonstrates the power of the great Christian stories as they apply today, away from their sometimes antiquated settings, providing a blueprint which takes the core teachings of the Christian past and invigorates them with renewed power for today’s world.