Scotsman Books of the Year: Recommendations from writers including Janice Galloway, AL Kennedy and Richard Holloway

Published on Saturday 3 December 2011 00:00

More recommendations and suggestions for books of the year from some of Scotland’s leading literary figures

• Ronald Frame, novelist

I like books which present me with mysteries: stories about lives and places which I’m required to finish. I peruse them in bed, and carry the images with me into sleep. There, beneath the level of consciousness, they resolve themselves, more or less. Here are two. Oliver Messel’s In the Theatre of Design (Rizzoli, £45) is wonderfully “superfluous” in a way. Messel’s 50 years’ worth of interior designs and stage sets – romantic, swooning, slightly fey – transport the imagination into a better world. And Riviera Cocktail (teNeues, £25), a cornucopia of black and white photographs of the glamorous life on the Cote d’Azur in the Fifties and Sixties. Irish photographer Edward Quinn snapped the famous, and beautiful, and in a split-second manoeuvre captured the enigma – the emptiness? – behind the public image.

• Janice Galloway, novelist

What I Don’t Know About Animals (Virago, £16.99) by Jenny Diski explores how we regard and treat our fellow creatures – often without much fellowship. Human illogicality and arrogance laid bare is not comfortable reading but her essays explore more than our shortcomings in grasping what an animal’s experience of the world might be. Orang-utans, lambs, the much put-upon chicken and Diski’s own cats remain unknowable but not unreachable “others” whose lives we ignore more than is humane or rational. Don Paterson’s Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Faber and Faber, £17.99) is another book that illuminates and breathes life into something we think we know. Sonnets viewed through the lens of modern life.

• Keith Gray, novelist

Walker Books published this year’s two finest books for teenagers in the shape of Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls (£12.99) and Mal Peet’s Life: An Exploded Diagram (£7.99). Ness’ book is the beautiful, painful, exquisite story of a boy coming to terms with his mother’s cancer. The illustrations help make it an object to be returned to. Peet’s book spans three generations of a rural Norfolk family but focuses on teenage Clem’s coming-of-age romance during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the way the shadow of “the Bomb” adds urgency and need to every emotion, every decision.

• Kirsty Gunn, novelist

The book I haven’t been able to get out of my mind is Robin Robertson’s gorgeously full and spoilt and risk-taking and ravishingly beautiful The Wrecking Light (Picador, £8.99), the most affecting collection of poetry I have come across in some time. The poems are poems we don’t so much read as smell and taste and touch and dream of … And I love my friend Meaghan Delahunt’s To The Island (Granta, £12.99), her vivid, sensuous story of family and the myths of belief and belonging, set in Greece and soaked in sun, food and wine, but shadowed with terror and violence. Finally, I am revisiting the essays that were the life’s work of Michel de Montaigne, and finding them a more necessary part of my education now than ever – accompanied, this time round, by Sarah Bakewell’s superb account of Montaigne’s life, How to Live (Vintage, £8.99). One essay a week and I’m sorted for this world!

• Jackie Kay, poet

Two stunning debuts went down nicely this year. In Helen Gordon’s Landfall (Fig Tree, £12.99), Alice works for an arts magazine and when it closes, she has to re-evaluate. She returns to her parents to housesit. Suddenly 16-year-old Emily arrives, wreaking havoc and forcing Alice to question everything. It’s an accomplished and surprising debut and a precise evocation of suburbia. Gordon’s study of suburbia is also a clear-eyed examination of nostalgia. Stuart Evers’s Ten Stories About Smoking (Picador, £14.99) are also infused with nostalgia. They haunt and seduce in equal measure. As tight as Carver, as elegiac as Somerset Maugham, these stories are remarkably assured. The tone is so finely judged that you feel in safe hands from the very first page and the stories are wonderfully, richly bleak. These are sad stories that will not even encourage the ex-smokers to reach for a cigarette to console them. And yet you almost relish the melancholy, which wafts through the rooms of the stories like cigarette smoke.

• Richard Holloway, writer and former bishop of Edinburgh

I almost enjoy a book about a long walk as much as a walk itself, so it was obvious To The River by Olivia Laing (Canongate, £16.99) would stride to the head of my list of reads of the year. Two things added to my pleasure. First, it takes us along the Ouse in Sussex, an area I know well; secondly, it brings Virginia Woolf along as a companion, up to the moment she filled her pockets with stones and walked into the Ouse to drown her suffering. It would be inaccurate to say I enjoyed Jerusalem by Simon Sebag Montefiore (W&N, £26), because it is too drenched in blood and strife and cruelty to be enjoyed: but it is a terrific achievement. It confirms once again something Lucretius said more than 2,000 years ago: nothing beats religion in persuading good people to do bad things.

• AL Kennedy, novelist

Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham (NYRB Classics, £8.99) is a blisteringly fine read, full of alcoholic horror, sexual heat and the fakery surrounding the spook racket. I was also very happy to find Mervyn Peake’s Complete Nonsense (Carcanet, £12.95), which brings together all Peake’s comic, fantastic and nonsensical verse. The pieces are full of a fastidious author’s joy in the sheer music of language, shot through with the sensitivity, melancholy and savage realism that sings in all his work. And I would recommend Marius Brill’s How To Forget (Doubleday, £12.99), a lovely and very funny exploration of magic, the mind and the perils of love.

• James Robertson, novelist

Dermot Healy’s novel Long Time, No See (Faber, £12.99), set in a small community on the west coast of Ireland, is a book to steep yourself in: slow, linguistically glorious, humorous and humane. Robert Crawford’s The Beginning and End of the World: St Andrews, Scandal and the Birth of Photography (Birlinn, £16.99) explores St Andrews in the 1840s when it was a centre of early photographic activity, as well as where Robert Chambers wrote a pre-Darwinian book on evolution that shocked the nation. And – although I have only managed to browse it so far – Andrew Feinstein’s The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade (Hamish Hamilton, £25) looks like a necessary exposure of an appalling industry, a book which Desmond Tutu calls “essential reading for anyone who believes that it is more important to invest in saving lives than in the machinery of death”.

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