Canongate Books: 273 books

When Martha accepts a place at university, her decision is met with a mixture of hostility and pride by her uncomprehending family. This is the story of a young woman's journey to maturity and independence, struggling to cope with the intellectual and emotional challenges that surround her, at a time...

An unforgettably challenging book about power and powerlessness, men and women, masters and servants, small countries and big countries, Alasdair Gray's exploration of the politics of pornography has lost none of its power to shock. 1982, Janine is a searing portrait of male need and inadequacy, as...

Introduced by Gordon Jarvie. Distinguished by irony, compassion and the author’s own dry wit, these three novels paint a memorable picture of life in the streets, schools and tenements of Glasgow in the 1950s and 60s. With a unique vision of loneliness, old age, sexual longing, hot young blood and...

Introduced by James Campbell. Caught in the melting pot of social injustice, revolution, war, and pacifism, this powerful book gives a vivid account of the experiences and struggles of a Glasgow family from the First World War and into the Depression at the end of the Twenties. It is a story of Glasgow...

On the side of a mountain, in eighteenth century Japan, sits a man in perfect stillness as the summit erupts, spitting fire and molten rock onto the land around him. The man is Hakuin. He will become the world's most famous teacher of zen. This is not the first time he has seen hell. Hakuin's quest...

Fethering has everything a sleepy coastal town should: snug English pubs, cosy cottages, a little local library – and the occasional murder . . . Bestselling author Burton St Clair, complete with soaring ego and wandering hands, has come to town to give a talk. But after his corpse is found slumped...

Abruzzo, Italy: a young priest suffers the stigmata of the crucifixion. The Vatican, Rome: the Pope calls on Harvard professor Cal Donovan to investigate the truth of the priest's claim. Berlin, Germany: a neo-Nazi organisation believes the priest is the key to an earth-shattering secret. A secret...

Gray argues that a truly independent Scotland will only ever exist when people in every home, school, croft, farm, workshop, factory, island, glen, town and city feel that they too are at the centre of the world. Independence asks whether widespread social welfare is more possible in small nations such...

Introduced by Christopher Harvie. Sir Edward Leithen, lawyer, politician, sportsman and occasional philosopher, was probably the most autobiographical of John Buchan’s heroes. This collection of four novels, written over a span of thirty years, shows Leithen/Buchan in all his moods – from the urban...

In March 1985, Mal Duff led a new expedition to conquer Everest by the unclimbed north-east ridge.The last attempt by a Chris Bonington team had ended in failure and tragedy - with the deaths of two great climbers, Joe Tasker and Pete Boardman. Everyone knew the risks as well as the excitement of...

Scott-Heron's highly successful two novels are now packaged together for the first time. The Vulture relates the strange story of John Lee's murder - telling it in the words of four men who knew him when he was just another kid working after school, hanging out, waiting for something to happen. Just...

Edwin Muir - POOR TOM, J.F. Hendry - FERNIE BRAE, Gordon M. Williams - FROM SCENES LIKE THESE, Tom Gallacher - APPRENTICE. Introduced by Liam McIlvanney. Growing Up in the West presents four very different and memorably vivid accounts of what it was to be young and growing up in Glasgow and the west...

'You can't upset anyone looking into old bones.' DCI Bill Slider's out of favour in the force - for accusing a senior Met officer of covering up an underage sex ring. As a punishment, he's given a cold case to keep him busy: some old bones to rake through, found buried in a back garden, from a murder...

Edited and introduced by Jenni Calder. Haunted by a sense that the living and the dead are separated by no more than a narrow and disputed borderland, the tales that Margaret Oliphant liked to call her ‘stories of the seen and the unseen’ are now recognised as among the most remarkable explorations...