Proudly flying the Saltire

IT'S EASY TO TELL whether a year has been a good one for Scottish books: look at the numbers the judges have to read for the Saltire Society Literary Awards and the length of the list of those that survive the early rounds of discussion and voting. On that basis, this was a very good year indeed.

That was certainly true for debut novels, both in Scots, like Alison Flett's Whit Lassys Ur Inty (Thirsty Books, 6.99) and, like Rodge Glass's No Fireworks (Faber, 10.99), in English. My own favourite, however, was John Aberdein's Amande's Bed (Thirsty Books, 9.99), a tour de force of good writing with artful gaps in a convoluted plot, and a really sharp sense of the city of Aberdeen in the 1950s, even down to the lamented end of their tramcars. Aberdein has a really sharp ear for dialogue and a good sense of the absurd that lurks in the everyday.

The main Saltire Society/Faculty of Advocates list of fiction also read impressively, a reminder that Scottish writing is in excellent health. There were famous names, and Ali Smith's The Accidental (Hamish Hamilton, 14.99) was rightly singled out for praise. The sense of dislocation in the everyday, and a unique narrative voice - spare and yet absorbing - make the book a compulsive read. Michel Faber continues to write top-notch short stories and The Fahrenheit Twins (Canongate, 12.99) kept up an extraordinary level of inventiveness, with each story artfully different. James Meek pulled off an astonishing success with The People's Act of Love (Canongate, 12.99), set in the frozen wastes of Siberia in a time of war, a story of rebellion and cruelty as well as love whose plot is difficult to summarise, but whose grasp of a vanished culture makes for compulsive reading.

There were lots of good insights into regions of Scottish life - Des Dillon's The Glasgow Dragon (Luath, 9.99), for instance, or Rhona Rauszer's Ultima Thule (Birlinn, 8.99), and a mind-boggling fantasy novel from Iain Banks in The Algebraist (Orbit, 7.99), but for me the year's best novel was Case Histories (Black Swan, 6.99), a really accomplished piece of plotting by Kate Atkinson which runs several layers of narrative together, ostensibly about a death or a murder, but really tracing permutations of family rupture, growing up, illusion and disillusion, until finally a solution emerges without any excessive neatness, but a sense of total narrative control. A book of great skill.

Beyond fiction there were plenty of delights too, like Barry Menikoff's Narrating Scotland (South Carolina Press, 29.50), a genuine contribution to Stevenson studies, and Andrew Marr's My Trade (Pan, 7.99) sharply written about a business he knows inside out.

Looking back on 2005, the impression is of a spread of fiction in decidedly good health. There was a small but significant entry of Gaelic writing in the competition, a strong representation of academic writing (quite a bit of it about fiction), some impressive poetry, some substantial biography, and enough fiction of quality to make judging difficult. Definition is always a challenge, but there is plenty of good writing from Scots both here and abroad, and people writing about Scotland from what is sometimes a great distance. Stevenson once commented in a letter home from Vailimaœ that he found it difficult to get Scotland, the "blessed beastly place", out of his head. Obviously the problem remains.

Professor Ian Campbell is co-convener of the Saltire Society Literary Awards.