85 books like Wee Macgreegor

As a kid, I was hooked on this story's vast, wide-open freedom. The notions of hidden treasure maps, buried fortunes, stealthy smugglers, and dangerous pirates affected me in profoundly positive ways, stimulating a wanderlust and a love of adventure. 

Although Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson set this swashbuckling tale on the south coast of England and the elusive Treasure Island in the Caribbean, it was inspired by his childhood experiences in Scotland, most notably trips with his dad to rocky islands and promontories (RLS’s father was a lighthouse engineer who designed and built many iconic lighthouses). 

When my father took the five-year-old me to The Admiral Benbow en route to a family holiday in Cornwall, I was amazed to find that the inn was a real place. It felt bristlingly alive to me, for this was the same inn where Billy Bones had lodged with the treasure map while hiding… show more.

While I’ve enjoyed most of Irvine Welsh’s books, this one (a collection of short stories) is my favorite because it accurately crystallizes a particular culture, place, and time.  The stories are set in Edinburgh and its environs, where I lived in a nearby village. My familiarity with the settings made this book feel intimate, sometimes unsettlingly so. I love the way each story blends the real and the surreal. 

There are drugs and booze galore, of course, as well as brutality and revenge, but the author’s savvy wit and incisive dialogue give these tales gravitas, authenticity, and philosophical depth. I laughed when a couple of years ago, I witnessed “Scotland’s top cop” (in the spoof police documentary Scot Squad) sum up Irvine Welsh’s written output as “monkey gibberish”—the barely concealed glee with which that phrase was delivered by comedian Jack Docherty (in deadpan style as the character Cameron Meikelson) tickled… show more.

To me, this book is the quintessentially Hebridean novel in existence. My paternal grandmother hailed from the Isle of Lewis (or Eilean Leòdhais, to give the island its proper Gaelic name), as did her parents and their parents, and so on back ad infinitum. I’ve always loved the wild beauty of the place. Lewis feels like Home with a capital H. It has a long history of poetry and song, but until fairly recently, not many novels have emerged from those shores. 

This book impressed me on several levels. Kevin MacNeil eloquently articulates the difficult duality experienced by many Lewis folk: on the isle, they feel isolated and often daydream of being elsewhere, but upon leaving the island, they feel uprooted, untethered, and lost.  And how do the islanders deal with this existential paradox? They drink. As in, really drink. In the Hebrides, alcohol is both a curse and a… show more.

I love this—Tom’s only published novel—not just because of the author’s impressive command of brevity (a prolific poet and short-story writer, he is a master of saying more with less) but also because his poet’s love of language shines through in the dialogue: each character has unique verbal habits and idiosyncrasies, just as people in real life have. Tom’s characters are the sort of folk I want to hang out with: philosophers, all; originals; one-offs; salt of the Earth. 

There’s also a wolf angle. Wolves have always resonated with me. As a child, I photographed them (mainly wildlife parks) wherever I could. In Nahatlatch Valley, British Columbia, where I holidayed with my family when I was seven, I lay in bed in the log cabin each night, howling along with the wolves whose song filled the forest outside. 

As a nineteen-year-old on holiday in Spain, I was so drunk one… show more.

This beautifully written novel tells the story of Kelly, as she makes her way home to Galloway from Glasgow.

Homeless and with addiction problems, Kelly experiences some of the problems that Glasgow is sadly well-known for, but what I really love about Paper Cup is that we see these issues from a middle-aged woman’s perspective so there is no glorifying of violence and excess.

Instead we are drawn into the precarious world of a vulnerable and damaged woman, and made to consider just how easy it would be for any one of us to slip through the cracks and tread the same path as Kelly. A truly thought-provoking read.

In A Litter of Bones, DCI Logan is sent to investigate a child’s disappearance and is suddenly thrown back to a previous case of a child disappearance and death he was involved in solving. The killer called Mr. Whispers is in prison, so why are children disappearing in the same manner as when he was out? Logan is perplexed. Can his small band of misfit detectives with Police Scotland handle the case? I haven’t read a suspenseful book that made me laugh out loud, and then cry a few pages later like this. The funny Scottish words, the author throws in occasionally like a wee delicious tidbit, were enough to set me laughing, too.

The series continues and still makes me laugh, while unable to turn pages fast enough to find out what happens next. Really, if you want a laugh while reading incredible suspense, you’re going to want… show more.

The most “please don’t do it” I have felt in response to a story is as Gray’s protagonist Thaw empties his pockets and throws his life documents and identifying possessions from a moving train on his way to his moment of madness. This will transpose or transform or, I suppose we must, translate Thaw into Lanark.

Critics have noted the many madcap imaginative moments in Gray’s large (in every sense) debut novel. The sequencing of the parts alone (Part 3, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 4) is enough to signal we are in no realist story of a boy and man’s life in Glasgow – more, think surrealist – and yet the book is also just that, and Glasgow is a hell called Unthank in the imagination of an artist who lived all his life in Glasgow.

I have a soft spot for this book. It provides probably the most well-known modern pop culture image of the king–and James does not come off well. Though he’s presented as highly intelligent and calculating, he is also shown to publicly and constantly play the clown: expect to see him drooling, falling about, and squeaking with terror as he cowers behind others on seeing unsheathed swords.

This is absolutely not what the real James was like–and I imagine he’d have had Tranter’s head for suggesting it–but it is a fun, ahistorical read (which gets bonus points for delightfully ludicrous subplots about Shakespeare touring Scotland scouting for locations and Queen Anna engaging in a lesbian romance with the Countess of Huntly).

I loved this book because I was able to find out more about this lynchpin of the indie music World of the 80s and 90s that I grew up in. Primal Scream was responsible for some iconic tunes, and learning more about Bobby was insightful and entertaining. I discovered so much that I didn’t know about the band’s musical journey and Bobby's influences.

A Trocchi renaissance, including a film of Young Adam starring A-Listers Ewan McGregor, Tilda Swinton, and Emily Mortimer, added to a growing reappraisal of Trocchi as a great Scottish writer, his reputation having been tarnished, fairly or unfairly, with drug use, indolence, and writer’s block.

Young Adam is a Scots crime novel the way James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is a high-jinx picaresque, which is to say only technically, and on the understanding that Hogg and Trocchi sit head, shoulders and in fact a full body length above these genres. But moment of madness there is, and arrest, trial, judgment, and condemnation. But the twist is that Trocchi’s own judgment and condemnation of society is what matters.