Graeme

Readers of crime fiction in Scotland have, in recent years, been spoiled by the quality and diversity of books by local authors. From the Rebus (and latterly Fox) of Ian Rankin to the Bob Skinner novels by Quintin Jardine via Denise Mina’s gritty social realism (most notably in her Garnethill [more...]

Chin’s memoir, Sex, Love and Sweet Suicide charts the author’s life from her childhood, living in foster care, to the present day. It’s an extraordinarily candid account of a life lived almost exclusively in transit, both literally and metaphorically. It details her battles against addiction and mental illness, and her [more...]

Tracey S Rosenberg’s debut novel is a thrilling and emotional re-imagining of the last days of the Third Reich, told through the eyes of Joseph Goebbels’s eldest daughter Helga. Combining first-person narrative with extracts from her endearingly optimistic diary, The Girl In The Bunker charts Helga’s journey from her position [more...]

Disputed Land, Tim Pears’ seventh novel, returns to the subject that has dominated his writing – families, their environments, and the dynamics that underpin them. Like his first novel, In The Place Of Fallen Leaves, he uses a young narrator, in this case a boy, Theo Cannon, who is taking his [more...]

Started Early, Took My Dog is Kate Atkinson’s seventh novel and her fourth featuring ex-army, ex-police and sometime private Detective Jackson Brodie who first appeared in the hazy, sun-drenched and impossibly sad Case Histories. It is a very modern mystery novel that muses as much on the past as it [more...]

Villain is the first novel by Shuichi Yoshida to be published in English and is translated from Japanese by Philip Gabriel. Although it concerns the murder of a young woman it is, at its heart, a novel about modern Japan. Yoshida uses the murder as a peg upon which to [more...]

Michael Cunningham’s fifth novel is a departure from his recent books, The Hours and Specimen Days, which drew on the work of Virginia Woolf and Walt Whitman respectively for inspiration. By Nightfall tells the story of art dealer Peter and magazine editor Rebecca, a forty-something couple who work in the [more...]

Landed is Tim Pears’ sixth novel, and although it shares broad themes with his previous work, it is arguably darker and certainly tricksier.  The story centres around Owen Ithell; of his childhood living with his grandparents in the Welsh hills and of the car accident that robs him not only of his [more...]