Sandstone Press Ltd: 78 books

Josephine Tey was the pen-name of Elizabeth MacKintosh (1896-1952). Born in Inverness, MacKintosh lived several ‘lives’: best known as Golden Age Crime Fiction writer ‘Josephine Tey’, she was also successful novelist and playwright ‘Gordon Daviot’. At one point, she had plays on simultaneously...

Edwin Morgan's restless imagination moved easily between multiple worlds, voices and identities. His own life story, told here for the first time, also reveals a range of identities - as academic, cultural activist, radical writer, international traveller, gay man and national poet. These identities...

Thousands of people visit the tiny and remote Hebridean island of Iona each year to experience its unique atmosphere of tranquil spirituality. The wood and wattle buildings built by Columba and his monks have long since vanished, replaced by the Benedictine abbey of stone which, after the Reformation,...

Daniel Defoe's Railway Journey describes the odyssey undertaken by two eccentric pensioners as they travel on every mile of railway track in the UK. Surreal and poignant by turns, Stuart Campbell describes the people they meet and the unwanted adventures that befall them. He is aided and abetted by...

From the moment I watched a documentary of Chris Bonington and Tom Patey climb the perpendicular flanks of the Old Man of Hoy I knew that my life would not be complete until I had followed in their footholds. That was in 1983 when I was thirteen. Within months I was tackling my first crags and dreaming...

Jonas Mortensen wants to be liked. Adam Fletcher wants to be forgotten. Jonas, a freewheeling Norwegian, has been living in a quiet English village for years, an eccentric everyone has an opinion about. Then the real owner of his house turns up. Fletcher, a traumatised veteran of the Afghan War, has...

The story of the National Youth Orchestra of Iraq is here told by its musical director from its inception to its eventual end. The NYOI came through the most difficult and dangerous of times to produce fine music not only in Iraq but also in Britain, Germany, France and the United States. A beacon...

Stubb Marakas—one of those 20 year-olds who indefinitely occupies his parents' attic—awakes one morning with the insatiable urge to doodle over Aesop fables. Aided by his best friend, Mark Connor (a swashbuckling Korean adoptee), the two set out to find the meaning behind this sudden craving,...

John McPake, a former teacher, has a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Soon after his marriage fell apart he started hearing voices and eventually moved into an Edinburgh hostel for men with enduring mental health problems. An earlier obsession with the works of Breughel develops into a full blown delusion,...

Shortlisted for the Betty Trask Prize 2019 Shortlisted for The Kitschies Golden Tentacle 2018 When a wealthy client visits Mathilde’s dressmaking shop, she finds herself drawn into the only surviving circle of luxury left in a barren London. Attending parties offers a welcome escape from life governed...

To Ride the Mountain Winds, possibly the first history of aerial mountaineering to span the whole period from the 18th century to the present day, is written for everyone interested in the history of mountaineering and also those interested in the history of aviation and the limits to which pilots...

September 2014. Two pivotal weeks in the life of Mickey Bell: HIV, on the dole, living in the high flats in Drumkirk. Mickey’s got a secret – he’s been climbing Scotland’s highest mountains – the Munros. When Mickey’s psychotic-ex Jonnie grasses him to the benefit fraud hotline, Mickey...

Author Jo Uddermann has published an autobiographical novel about certain dark events in his past. Expectations run high both in the publishing house and the media, but after an appearance on television sinister things begin to happen: anonymous letters, Barbie dolls with their heads cut off, dead...

Everything good is wild. It’s the word we use when something’s worth something. Wild is what you want to be, wild is how you want to look, wild is what you want to have. The world is a dangerous place. People live in domed cities, walls keep nature out, everything is civilised. But there is a...