The most recommended books about Scottish people

R.Murray Gilchrist was a Derbyshire man from a good Derbyshire family, liked or loved by the local people he met and helped, but a loner, a total oddity in the wild English Peak District of a hundred years ago: who wanted to be an artist of all things.

His stories are grotesque, sad, touching, and strange; all at once. He doesn't seem to set out to frighten the reader, not at all, but there's a sense of eerie, rather dreadful, longing that will haunt you. As Ellis Reed says (read the article), this was Lovecraft before Lovecraft, but with no cute tentacled monsters to lighten things up. Don't read them all at once.

I absolutely adored this book. I laughed from beginning to end. This is an adventure like no other and set in one of my favourite countries, Scotland. I have been lucky to visit Scotland twice. Its history, culture, scenery, and people have intrigued me since I was a child. The main characters are kilt-wearing animals, eating lots of cake and doing their best to fit in. These wolves might be the polite high society type, but they have a voracious appetite that makes the story so entertaining. It’s a tale full of delightful Scottish humour, castles, dungeons, and a villainous real estate agent. This hilarious romp through the Scottish countryside brings back wonderful memories of all that I have encountered while visiting this fabulous country. 

I value this book because, since joining the United Kingdom in 1707, much of Scottish history has been disregarded. Even though I studied history in my Scottish school to a high level, the details of our past were replaced with English history. Well-known radio personality, Billy Kay, brings together a wealth of information about Scotland’s outside influence through the ages. Scotland was one of the first countries to see the benefit of an educated working class, and in the countries to which they emigrated, their learning stood them in good stead. Scottish culture, over hundreds of years before it was incorporated into the United Kingdom, had well-established cultural centers throughout Europe and even as far as Russia.

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.

Like most people raised in the US, I thought I learned the history of westward expansion in school. I even knew that Manifest Destiny destroyed Native American populations and cultures. But this novel by Alix Christie brings the tragedy home in ways the flat text of history books cannot.

Through the story of two generations of one family, The Shining Mountains explores how a relatively respectful discourse between fur traders and indigenous peoples in the Pacific Northwest deteriorated into hostility, suspicion, racial discrimination, warfare, trickery, and murder after the Gold Rush of 1849, with long-term consequences to both those displaced and the natural environment.

Beautifully written and timely, The Shining Mountains will get you thinking and warm your heart.

Not just one house, this time, but houses - a whole village in fact.  Adam Thorpe’s dazzlingly inventive novel is the story of a rural community over three and half centuries, narrated by a chorus of different voices.  Human dramas proliferate: love affairs, murders, executions, violent uprisings. But as people come and go, things stay put, outlasting them. An adulterous eighteenth-century lady is confined to her shuttered bed-chamber, forbidden to go down the creaky old stairs. Fifty years later a garrulous carpenter, reminiscing in the pub, describes the cutting of the wooden scroll that finished the banister of the new staircase he and his mates have built in the Hall, once that lady’s home. Two generations later a consumptive young lawyer, taking down the testimony of dozens of Luddite machine-breakers, visits the Hall, notices the stairs, judges them dark and old-fashioned. Time passes again and a 20th-century television cameraman leans… show more.

The various Scots dictionaries produced by Scottish Language Dictionaries and also available online are a veritable treasure trove of Scottish culture and the go-to place for anyone who writes Scots or wants to know about Scots. With quotations going back hundreds of years it gives you instant access to the rich literature and prose in a language still spoken by over 1.5 million Scots. 

With a broader focus than the 1774 campaign into the Ohio Valley known as Dunmore’s War, James David’s book gave me a vivid picture of the late colonial North American and British landscape in which Dunmore lived and moved and had his being. An engaging read as well as an indispensable resource for a historical fiction writer.

In preparation for visiting Scotland in the summer of 2023, I read this book.

It makes a fascinating argument that this small country on the edge of Europe, in a dazzling and brief burst of intellectual creativity, invented the modern world. It is a huge claim but is backed up in the discussion of how Scots such as Adam Smith invented economics, the geologist James Hutton gave us the idea of deep time, and David Hume was the first philosopher of modernity.

OK I am biased. I was born in Scotland. But even if you did not have the good fortune to be born Scottish, the book is a marvelous read. Packed with details without losing the tight thread of the argument, it is also less of a brag sheet than a careful rendering of complex ideas.

I have read many commentaries on David Hume, for example, and most fail… show more.

I will always be grateful to Julias Glass because once upon a time, she was gracious enough to let a journalism graduate student make her the subject of a dissertation: a profile about Glass and the tribulations of creating a sophomore novel after your debut is a ginormous success. 

Three Junes, which won the 2002 National Book Award, is that first novel. 

Glass’s story about the members of the McLeod family and the physical and emotional journeys that take its members to Greece, Scotland, and Greenwich Village is as mesmerizing as everyone says. Truly.