Local writers and poets from across Edinburgh come together to create a collective love letter to the city they call home. Episode 3: Flic McCann Jacqueline Gilchrist Hilary Birch Anne Hogarth

Local writers and poets from across Edinburgh come together to create a collective love letter to the city they call home. Episode 2: Elaine Harris Sylvia Trotter Janet Lewis Susan Cheney

Local writers and poets from across Edinburgh come together to create a collective love letter to the city they call home.    Episode 1: Barbara Munro Anna Phillips Anne Milne Billy Cornwall

Marian Keyes didn’t start writing until her twenties, she felt that she was ‘all washed up at 30.’ But readers have had a love affair with Keyes that has lasted over two decades now. It’s hard to imagine a greater, more reliable comfort than a new book by Marian Keyes landing solidly in your lap, promising all the qualities that have come to define her work: complicated family dynamics, bountiful quantities of laughter, skeletons in the closet and uncomfortable moments of truth that lie...

‘You were always sitting in character, you were just never sure which one.’ So says Norah to the memory of her mother in Actress, the new novel by Anne Enright. The mother in question is Katherine O’Dell, who died aged 58 – the same age Norah has now reached. Actress is a portrait of life in the theatre, of one woman’s rise to fame and her subsequent decline, with all the challenges that women on stage faced in the years before the #MeToo movement shone light on them. But this novel is...

While the Summer of Love is about to unfold across the Atlantic, life in 1967 isn’t so easy for a young would-be musician in London’s shabby Charing Cross Road. Yet from this modest starting point, David Mitchell builds a joyful fictional biography of a band that will take the world by storm. Utopia Avenue is the finest prog-folk band you have never heard of, and the novel of the same name is a stylish romp through the rags-to-riches lives of drummer Griff, singer Elf, guitarist Jasper and...

Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency is more than just a collection of Olivia Laing’s essays over decades. Ranging from interviews and profiles to reflections and confessionals, Laing’s characteristic generosity of spirit and optimism of purpose inspires hope in the midst of the unsettling weather of the present emergency. But this book is also a manifesto for the power, the value and the need for art: ‘Art is… political in the sense of being available as a tool for protest and activism… but...

2020 was, without doubt, a banner year for challenging our understanding of what constitutes a global problem and how equipped we are to address that task collectively. At the start of that year — what feels like an age ago — after generations of scientific findings and urgent calls to action, a unified, collective response to the global climate crisis remained elusive. But there were some green shoots of hope. Late in 2019, the European Commission announced the formation of the European...

As a war correspondent in the Balkans, through to her time as senior policy advisor to Barack Obama, and her appointment in 2013 as US Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power has spent her career committed to resolving international conflict and protecting human dignity. In her intimate and candid memoir, Education of an Idealist, Power offers an urgent response to the pressing question of our times, ‘What can one person do?’. The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and Professor of...

‘Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.’ So said Abraham Lincoln in one of his rousing speeches, but it is a sentiment that could come straight out of the playbook of popular Dutch historian Rutger Bregman. Bregman's compelling ‘hopeful history,’ Humankind, is a bracingly optimistic account of human nature. Essentially, in his view, the...

Earmarked as ‘the voice of our communal consciousness’ by Edinburgh International Book Festival’s 2018 Guest Selector Afua Hirsch, it’s hard to believe that Roger Robinson hasn’t been a staple of British public life since time immemorial. A fixture of the UK spoken word scene for many years, Robinson rocketed to national prominence in 2019 when his third poetry collection, A Portable Paradise, bagged the prestigious T S Eliot Prize. Firmly rooted in the dub poetry tradition of his...

With Val McDermid’s iconic detective soon set to hit our screens, it couldn’t be a more perfect time to revisit Police Scotland's Historic Cases Unit and the savvy, no-nonsense DCI Karen Pirie. A thrilling new head-scratcher from the undisputed ‘Queen of Crime,’ Still Life sees the much-loved detective inspector confronted by a decade-old cold case, drawing her into a historical cover-up that someone would do anything to keep under wraps. With all the dizzying narrative trickery and canny...

‘Life is just a party, and parties weren’t meant to last.’ The post-punk protagonists of Andrew O’Hagan’s Mayflies would probably describe the lyrics of Prince’s hit pop song 1999 as ‘Yankee pish,’ but O’Hagan’s novel catches exactly the mood of the song. The ephemeral nature of life, burning brightly and then so soon extinguished, lies at the heart of this soulful story of two lads from small-town Scotland. Tully and James are growing up in Irvine, steeped in the music of the Fire...

One of Scotland’s most gifted and unpredictable writers, Michel Faber has always defied categorisation. His previous novels including Under the Skin, The Crimson Petal and the White and The Book of Strange New Things have been described as ‘unbelievably clever,’ ‘wildly entertaining’ and ‘impossible to put down.’ Now he returns with D, his most shape-shifting book yet. Like The Wizard of Oz, Faber’s novel is a political adventure that will be enjoyed by children and adults alike. Its...

Rarely does a novel set the Scottish literary scene abuzz in the way Scabby Queen has, counting amongst its fans figures as wide-ranging as Janice Galloway, Ian Rankin and Nicola Sturgeon. Sexy rock starlet, veteran political activist, symbol of a nation in decline — who really was Clio Campbell? In Kirstin Innis’s effervescent follow-up to her Not the Booker Prize-winning Fishnet, she invites you on a whistle-stop tour of the fictional Glasgow chanteuse’s life in the days following her...

‘When we read and write, when we love our fellow creatures, when we walk on the beach, when we just listen and notice, we are not little cogs in the machine, but part of the remedy.’ These luminous words by Kathleen Jamie form part of the introduction to Antlers of Water, an outstanding collection of contemporary Scottish writing about nature and landscape. The generosity of Jamie’s approach as editor of the collection goes beyond the stellar selection of contributors such as Amy Liptrot,...

‘Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford in the late sixteenth century.’ This epigraph to Maggie O’Farrell’s new novel, Hamnet, dispels any doubt that Shakespeare’s son and his most celebrated character are meaningfully linked. In a short but scorchingly emotional book, O’Farrell brings us into the 16th century world of Shakespeare’s family living in Stratford. It is the time of the bubonic plague and with one of the family members falling into a...

Following on from his acclaimed trilogy about the American soul music scene in the 1960s, much-loved Scottish broadcaster and writer Stuart Cosgrove returns to the American post-war era with his highly topical new book. In Cassius X: Six Months That Shaped The Sixties, Cosgrove charts the journey of a young Kentucky boxer named Cassius Clay. Alongside his rise as a fighter, Clay begins to embrace the ideas of the Black Power movement and the teachings of Malcolm X. Thus, Clay changes his...

When Shokoofeh Azar received the news that she was the first ever Iranian writer to be shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, she was transported back to when she was 15 years old, ‘in the village, surrounded by rainforest and rice fields, and dreamed of someday I would win this award as an Iranian writer.’ The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree is an incandescent novel that intertwines Persian history and folklore with magical realism, to tell the story of one family in the...

In Maaza Mengiste’s latest novel, the shadowy nature of figures from the past is played out in complex and interlocking ways. The Shadow King is powerful, stirring historical fiction that centres women within stories of war and battle that have traditionally excluded them, eliding their contribution and their fight. Against the backdrop of Italy’s 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, this is a story of Africa and Europe, of resistance and exile, of tradition and modernity, that is sweeping in vision...

We have all become familiar with living through these strange times but for Ian Rankin 2020 was unusual in more ways than one. For starters, even though the number one bestselling writer thought he was taking a year off, he found himself topping the charts with a book he once hoped would ‘never see the light of day again.’ That book is Westwind, first published in 1990 in an edition of just 1000 copies, but strikingly relevant today in its brand-new edition. What’s more, his new Rebus...

Celebrated Mexican author Fernanda Melchor’s first book translated into English, Hurricane Season, has been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. In a piece for Granta, the book’s translator Sophie Hughes reflected: ‘Melchor goes with her characters to the edge of the precipice. As her English translator, I followed her there and was left changed and with many questions about her method and influences, manipulating readers, and the unavoidable lure of darkness.’ Ahead of the...

Over the years that James Naughtie has been reporting on world politics, the USA has undergone seismic changes. Naughtie first visited the States in 1970 as a student, when the Vietnam War was raging and Richard Nixon was in the Oval Office. Since then, Naughtie has grown into one of the BBC’s best-respected reporters and has covered every election since the triumph of Ronald Reagan. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, it appeared that the US would reign as the world’s only superpower –...

Of the five women who died in the Autumn of 1888 at the hands of Jack the Ripper, the most salient thing that has remained in the public imagination has been the brutal manner of their murders. While the identity of the murderer has been the subject of relentless, salacious speculation, only now have the stories of those who were killed been told. Hallie Rubenhold’s landmark publication, The Five, reconstructs the lost lives of Mary Ann 'Polly' Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride,...