Insider's Choice: 'These are the best Scottish literary debuts of 2025'
Books industry insider Vikki Reilly names her favourite Scottish debuts of 2025
In this month’s column, I’m looking back over the year to celebrate some brilliant debuts that deserve a wider audience, showing that there are always new favourite authors to discover.
Debut historical fiction has been a particular highlight for me this year, and firstly I’d like to focus on two novels set against the backdrop of hard rural living. Both are similar in structure, with alternating character narrative chapters, and both explore how modernity and reason clash with tradition and superstition.
The first, The Foreshore by Samantha York (Salt, £10.99) is set in the 1700s, and sees the ambitious Reverend Thomas Murray sent to a remote Scottish island to convert the population to Presbyterian worship. Then a mute woman is washed ashore, barely alive, and only Murray and grieving mother Flora Mackinnon try to help the stranger, though their motives for taking care of her are not entirely led by charity and generosity. When the islanders’ crops fail, and death and disease run rampant, they become convinced that the woman is a witch, and she must go into hiding to survive. It’s a haunting novel of grief, secrets, obsession and brutality that utterly dispels any notion of a romantic past, and is gripping stuff.
I also enjoyed Greater Sins by Gabrielle Griffith (Doubleday, £16.99) set in the North-East of Scotland as the First World War roars on in distant France. We are introduced to the spirited, determined Lizzie, wife of the village landowner, and Johnny, the freewheeling minstrel and farm hand. They discover a woman’s body preserved in a peat bog, and each is determined to find out her identity. Their friends, family and neighbours, however, are deeply unsettled, and, as in The Farshore, rationality is in short supply. Then figures from Lizzie and Johnny’s pasts arrive in the village, stirring up unwanted memories that end up connecting their two histories in a terrible twist. It’s a dark, creepy yet smoothly told tale that will have readers racing to the last page.
To Edwardian Scotland, and The Show Woman by Emma Cowing (Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99), a marvellous tale of a gang of brave and brilliant women touring the country in the first all-women circus. Each of them has great skills as well as dark secrets waiting to spoil their daring endeavours, and, on top of that, they have a rival circus show hellbent on ruining their fun and success. The Show Woman will both uplift and break your heart— there’s romance, real camaraderie and heaps of sawdust atmosphere, while the betrayals, tragedies, and truths uncovered will make your stomach flip. Cowing has given us a cast of characters you will really care about.
Finally, to poetry, and from the first poem “Beithir” — a magnificent, energising call to arms on the Scots language, shaped like a fiery tongue on the page — it’s clear that Goonie by Michael Mullen (Corsair, 5 June, £10.99), the poet’s debut collection, will be delivering a number of fist pump moments. It’s a fearless, joyous collection, one that absolutely confirms that the language Mullen uses matters as is the culture he celebrates. The poems about sex, queer lives, dirty rivers, tenaments, family house parties with Vodka Irn Brus and the Slosh are rich, wonderful, necessary and life-affirming.
Vikki Reilly has worked in Scottish books for over 20 years and now works for Publishing Scotland, the trade and networking body for Scotland’s book publishing sector. She also edits BooksfromScotland.com, a website that promotes the best in Scottish writing, contemporary and classic, and supports Scottish publishers and authors to find new audiences.
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