When her mother had a series of strokes, Tessa Fontaine couldn't stand to watch her disappear right in front of her. The Electric Woman tells Tessa's story of joining America's last travelling freak show and learning to perform death-defying acts to help come to terms with her mother's illness.
Johnny Jackson has just turned 75. He used to be famous, but his dead brother Duke was a hero. This is a novel about brothers, lovers and all that's lost in the longing to get what you want.
In Bump, Bike & Baby, Moire O'Sullivan charts her journey from happy, carefree mountain runner to reluctant, stay-at-home mother of two.
The story of the National Youth Orchestra of Iraq, its origins, troubles, many achievements, and its eventual end.
The castles and other properties owned and managed by the National Trust for Scotland are precious jewels in the crown of the nation's heritage. This book pays tribute to the people who have made the Trust's properties so very special.
More than two decades after his brother Finn fell to his death, Calum still relives the event and struggles to find peace of mind. It isn't so easy, however: his mother, Mary, has Alzheimer's Disease and his estranged daughter Catriona has arrived out of the blue.
Scattered across the Scottish Highlands are the last surviving remnants of the Caledonian forest which have survived since the last ice age. Visiting these ancient woods provides an emotional connection to the people who lived and worked there over the centuries.
Drawing from more than forty years of experience as an outdoorsman, and probably the world's best known long distance walker who also writes, Chris Townsend describes the landscapes and wildlife, the walkers and climbers, and the authors who have influenced him in this lucid and beautiful book. Writing from his home in the heart of the Cairngorms he discusses the wild, its importance to civilisation and how we cannot do without it.
A Message from the Other Side is a novel about love and marriage, but even more about hatred and the damage people do to each other in the most ordinary of families.
The Passion of Harry Bingo: Further Dispatches From Unreported Scotland is the second volume of selected journalism from one of Scotland's most popular writers. It follows the highly successful publication in 2014 of Daunderlust
All Shona wants is a simple life with her young son. Then there's the shaman living in her shed. When her teenage daughter goes missing, she's certain her ex is the culprit. Shona soon discovers that the secrets she buried are as dangerous as the family curse haunting her mother.
In over 40 years as a senior captain for Greenpeace International, Peter Willcox has been in the vanguard of the international environmentalist movement. He is the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from The Guardian.This is his story.
Set near San Francisco, this warm and funny novel follows the fortunes and failures of Jack and Milly for sixty years. They marry in 1952, and typical of post-war couples, shift up a class. Optimistic and full of plans, they see themselves living the American Dream.
For one brilliant season in 1983 the sport of fell running was dominated by the two huge talents of John Wild and Kenny Stuart. Together they destroyed the record book, only determining who was top by a few seconds in the last race of the season.
A story of a toxic love gone wrong, with a setting that moves easily between present day London and 1990s Cambridge, Stronger Than Skin is compulsively readable.
Jane Austen and Dorothy Wordsworth were born just four years apart, in the 1770s, in a world torn between heady revolutionary ideas and fierce conservatism. Jane and Dorothy compares their upbringing and education, home lives and loves and, above all, their emotional and creative worlds.
The world is a dangerous place. People live in domed cities, walls keep nature out, everything is civilised. Step into a word museum, plug into a simulation, experience being anything, anywhere, anytime...
Paul Buchanan is on the run in the Scottish Highlands with his naive younger brother, Mikey, following Mikey's release from prison. Darkly comic and gripping, the novel takes the brothers on a disastrous road trip across a surreal version of modern Scotland, heading not away from danger but towards it, and their final nemesis.
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 come to claim his inheritance. The two men live side by side in an increasingly bizarre standoff, until a teenage girl goes missing and suspicion falls on Jonas. As the hunt intensifies, it's clear both men are concealing past lives that won't stay hidden much longer.
A collection of linked short stories, all set in and around the small village of Blaxhall in the sandlings of coastal Suffolk, which is the reason for the title, 'Sandlands'. The collection is inspired by the landscape of the area and its flora and fauna, as well as by its folklore and historical and cultural heritage. Six of the twelve stories focus around a particular bird, animal, wildflower or insect characteristic of the locality, from barn owl to butterfly. The book might be described as a collection of ghost stories; in fact, while one or two stories involve a more or less supernatural element, each of them deals in various ways with the tug of the past upon the present, and explores how past and present can intersect in unexpected ways. The stories uncover what is real and enduring beneath the surface of things.
Weary of her Yorkshire county life of grouse moors and hunt balls, Amelia Dalton threw herself instead into running a deep sea trawler amongst the closed community of fishermen in NE Scotland in the '90s.
In the final days of the British Raj a young Hindu woman, Asha, is deeply in love with Firoze, a Muslim, but with Partition she and her family must flee. In 1998, the newly widowed Asha travels to New York to visit her granddaughter, who is to marry a Pakistani Muslim called Hussain and learns that his grand-uncle is Firoze.
A funny and fascinating autobiography from one half of The Corries, the popular Scottish folk duo who wrote and made famous Scotland's unofficial national anthem, "Flower of Scotland."
This tender and personal memoir by the poet Joanna Ramsey of George Mackay Brown gives an account of some aspects of the last eight years of his life in Stromness, Orkney, and of the friendship between them. It also provides a background to his poem 'A New Child: ECL 11 June 1993' (included in the anthology Following a Lark), which he wrote for Joanna's daughter. There are many small details of George's day to day life in those last years that are not included in any other account. Also included are an unpublished poem written for Joanna, and a number of birthday acrosti written for her and her daughter, Emma.In his final years George Mackay Brown rarely travelled beyond Stromness, but many of his friends visited him there; the book is also peopled by George's other friends, and paints a portrait of a man who remained very dear and important to others until his death and beyond it.
A Fine House in Trinity is a Leith-set contemporary crime novel about an alcoholic who gains an inheritance, only to find that someone is prepared to kill him for it. To survive he must sober up, solve a murder, and stay one step ahead of the man who wants him dead.
Alice's life is dictated by her autistic son, Sam, who refuses to leave their remote Lancashire farm. Her only time 'off' is two hours in Lancaster on a Tuesday afternoon - and even that doesn't always pan out to be the break she needs. Husband Duncan brings Larry, a rootless wanderer, to the farm to embark on a money making scheme they've dreamed up. Alice is hostile but Larry beguiles Sam with tales of travel in the outside world and, soon, Alice begins to fall for him, too. By turns blackly comic, heart-breaking and heart-warming, Truestory looks at what happens when sacrifice slithers towards martyrdom. By turns happy and sad, ultimately it is a tale of hope.
The armistice is months past but the memories won't go away. 'A harlequin, leaning against a tree stump and with a goblet of ale clasped in one outstretched hand. Beaumont felt chilled suddenly, in spite of the fire... Most likely it wasthe thing's mouth, red-lipped and fiendishly grinning, or maybe its face, which was white, expressionless, the face of a clown in full greasepaint.'Dennis Beaumont drove an ambulance in World War One. He returns home to London, hoping to pick up his studies at Oxford and rediscover the love he once felt for his fiancee Lucy. But nothing is as it once was. Mentally scarred by his experiences in the trenches, Beaumont finds himself wandering further into darkness. What really happened to the injured soldier he tried to save? Who is the figure that lurks in the shadows? How much do they know of Beaumont, and the secrets he keeps?
William Hutchison Murray (1913 - 1996) was one of Scotland's most distinguished climbers in the years before and after the Second World War. As a prisoner of war in Italy he wrote his first classic book, Mountaineering in Scotland, on rough toilet paper which was confiscated and destroyed by the Gestapo. The rewritten version was published in 1947 and followed by the, now, equally famous, Undiscovered Scotland. In 1951 he was depute leader to Eric Shipton on the Everest Reconnaissance Expedition, which discovered the eventual successful route which would be climbed by Hilary and Tensing. From the 1960s onwards he was heavily involved in conservation campaigns and his book, Highland Landscape, commissioned by the National Trust for Scotland, identified areas of outstanding beauty that should be protected. It proved to be extremely influential. In 1966 he was awarded an OBE as he pursued a life of service, as is well illustrated by the various posts he held: Commissioner for the Countryside Commission for Scotland (1968-1980); President of the Scottish Mountaineering Club (1962-1964) and of the Ramblers Association Scotland (1966-82); Chairman of Scottish Countryside Activities Council (1967-82); Vice-President of the Alpine Club (1971-72); President of Mountaineering Council of Scotland (1972-75). He was a prolific author but a proper understanding of his life and work requires that we appreciate that his driving force was a quest to achieve inner purification that would lead him to oneness with Truth and Beauty. For many years the climber, author and teacher, Robin Lloyd-Jones (above) has been researching the life and work of Bill Murray and working steadily on this biography. It is not only a triumph of fine writing and interest, but a worthy accolade for this great man.
This book offers a detailed history of the sport of fell running. It also tells the stories of some of the great exponents of the sport through the ages. Many of them achieved greatness whilst still working full time in traditional jobs, a million miles away from the professionalism of other branches of athletics nowadays. The book covers the early days of the sport, right through to it going global with World Championships. Along the way it profiles influential athletes such as Fred Reeves, Bill Teasdale, Kenny Stuart, Joss Naylor, and Billy and Gavin Bland. It gives background to the athletes including their upbringing, introduction to the sport, training, working life, records and achievements. It also includes in-depth conversations with some of the greats, such as Jeff Norman and Rob Jebb. The author is a committed runner and qualified athletics coach. He has considerable experience of fell running, competing in the World Vets Champs when it was held in Keswick in 2005. He is a long-time member of the Fell Runners Association (FRA). Using a mixture of personal experience, material from extensive interviews, and that provided by an extensive range of published and unpublished sources, a comprehensive history of the sport and its characters and values is revealed.
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