The most recommended books about Scotland

Nala's adventure shows how the love of an animal can change the trajectory of a man's life. Dean set out to explore the world on his bike. Along the way he met and fell head over wheels (!) with a kitten, whom he named Nala. Something about the piercing eyes and plaintive meowing of the bedraggled little cat proved irresistible. He couldn't leave her to her fate, so he put her on his bike and then, with the help of local vets, nursed her back to health. Soon on his travels, they forged an unbreakable bond -- both curious, independent, resilient and adventurous.

Ross Sayers is one of my favourite contemporary Scottish authors. His books are always unique and humorous with genuine characters. This book looks at the subject of memory, how we can yearn to go back to a particular moment in time, how we can be trapped by things that have happened in our past and asks if we can really trust our own memories. It contains dual timelines alternating between 2019, with Hannah’s first day working at Memory Lane in Edinburgh, and 1975, inside the memory of John Valentine as he relives his wedding day over and over again. It’s a compelling work of speculative fiction that forces the reader to confront their own memories.

It takes real guts to prove all the naysayers wrong, and become a hero.

Raassay is a remote Scottish island, site of the Rona lighthouse, which Calum MacLeod tended full time until 1967 when he was 56, and the lighthouse was semi-automated.  As the only man living in northern Raasay, he had some more time on his hands.

To bring more people to the area, he decided to build a road, nearly two miles long, using just a pick, a shovel, a wheelbarrow, multiple pairs of wellington boots, and his bare hands.  It took him ten years. Today on Calum’s Road or “Rathad Chaluim” (in Gaelic) drivers are in awe of one man’s determination to do what he believed was needed, despite the cost.

Addie is a young, autistic girl in Scotland. She learns dozens of women were executed for witchcraft right in her own village. She is horrified even though it took place hundreds of years before.

Addie feels a kinship with the women and becomes determined to create a memorial for them. Unfortunately, other than her big sister and her best friend, no one else understands her passion for women who died so long ago.

The story is written in first person, and is an #ownvoices book, as the author, Elle McNicoll, is autistic herself. Neurodiverse people are under-represented in literature, but A Kind of Spark helps readers see that autistic people can be the heroes of their own stories.

This is simply the best biography of Charles Edward Stuart. It is meticulously researched and absolutely gimlet-like in its analysis of the man and his career. 

Yet though McLynn depicts the prince warts and all (and some of the warts, such as his propensity for domestic violence, are pretty disgusting), he retains a fundamental sympathy for the flawed human being.  In the larger sense it is very much an account, too, of the gathering degradation of a man who in other circumstances might have become a radical, reforming monarch.

My grandparents were Irish, which explains why Celtic mythology speaks to me. I hadn’t heard of Dream Angus (aka Aengus) until I read this book, by which time it was too late to quiz my ancestors on this impish Eros, golden-haired bearer of dreams. It was said that sometimes he kissed lovers and, when they parted, the kisses turned into songbirds who followed them home, serenading them with love songs. The author intersperses his telling of the legend with contemporary stories set in Scotland where one of the characters is especially influenced by an aspect of Dream Angus’s personality, sometimes good, sometimes quite the opposite. Angus lives on in a lullaby recorded, among others, by Barbara Dickson. It’s both haunting and sweet, just as love can be.

I want to reveal to people the superb achievement of the medieval Scots Makars who produced arguably the greatest poetry anywhere in Europe or Britain between roughly 1450 to 1550. John Barbour, William Dunbar, Robert Henryson, Gavin Douglas, and Sir David Lyndsay are the greatest of them but there are more excellent exponents of Scots in this, one of its golden ages, and they are all represented here. I quote many of them in my book.

I was gripped from the first page of this propulsive psychologic thriller set on a windswept Scottish island.

Just thinking about it, I can feel myself being transported back to the dreary, rain-lashed shores of Angus. I can feel the claustrophobia and desperation of Sarah’s dilemma. I found myself chained to the story, my understanding of the characters and their situation yanked to and fro with every new twist and turn. I couldn’t stop reading.

But like the best fiction, The Ice Twins stayed with me long after I closed the book. It encapsulates some of my favorite literary elements—a dark brooding atmosphere, characters at odds with their own perceptions of reality, and a suggestion of the supernatural.

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).

This hilarious Shakespearean-style romantic romp hooked me from the moment the main character, Kenzie en Shareed marries the wrong guy. Filled with faux pas from the get-go, I found the cast of Unintended trying to right wrongs in the most hysterical and sometimes disturbing ways. I also loved the way the pair of imaginative authors created their fantasy world of Ismera. Sprinkled with the nostalgic feeling of Old World Scotland and Britain, coupled with their use of modern-day language to bridge the gap of the past and present, readers of this type of genre (think Outlander meets a Shakespearean comedy) won’t be disappointed. This tale ends with a few surprises, leaving me feeling satisfied and ready for the next sojourn to Ismera.