Search results for ""canongate books""

Some secrets won''t let go . . . Is the truth about a devastating family tragedy about to be unveiled?Stellar . . . Fraser is in top form - Publishers Weekly Starred ReviewTragedy strikes a quiet Dorset town when the bodies of Sarah and Charles Drummond are discovered in their home one morning while their two young children, Abby and Mia, sleep upstairs. The police seem certain that Charles killed his wife before taking his own life, and the girls'' grandmother, Cicely Fairfax, makes sure that they are shielded from the horrific truth.Until now. Sixteen years later, an accident at work leads Mia to have disturbing flashbacks to the night her parents met their untimely deaths. What did she see? What really happened that fateful evening? When Mia and Abby eventually share painful memories from the night that changed their lives forever, they get closer to uncovering the truth, and a dark secret from the past is finally revealed . . .

Read more less

This volume presents the texts of two Old Testament books, Ruth and Esther, two of the very few biblical stories to focus on women. Ruth in particular has attracted much attention from feminist scholars, though it reinforces age-old notions of male dominance. With an introduction by Joanna Trollope.

Read more less

Giant Steps examines the most important figures in the creation of modern jazz, detailing the emergence of bebop through the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Fats Navarro, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk. Using this as its starting point, Giant Steps subsequently delves into the developments of jazz composition, modal jazz and free jazz. The music of each of these great masters is examined in detail and will provide both a fine introduction for the large audience newly attracted to the music but unsure of their direction through it, as well as an entertaining and informative read for those with a more substantial background.

Read more less

This collection marks the arrival of a major new talent in Scottish poetry. Kevin MacNeil's voice and vision, while rooted in the Hebridean islands, is open to a wide range of cultures, not only those of Scotland - from Gaeldom to urban Scotland - but to the wider European and American mind and, through his interest in Zen Buddhism, to Japanese and Chinese culture.With astonishing freshness and versatility, MacNeil's poetry creates powerful connections and new combinations -he has wit as well as feeling, a powerful sense of the past and the local while being resolutely turned towards the future and the cross-cultural.

Read more less

sland Landfalls · The Wrecker · The Ebb-TideDriven to the South Seas by ill health, Stevenson could not close his eyes to the impact of colonialism, the 'stirabout of epochs and races, barbarisms and civilisations, virtues and crimes'. Setting his imaginative writings within the social and political contexts of his letters and essays from the South Seas, reveals the deepening and broadening of Stevenson's genius and his growing awareness of and anger at white exploitation. It was a society in which his love of adventure, his awareness of the extremes of human nature, and his fascination with good and evil, could find full release.Tales of the South Seas gathers together all of Stevenson's South Sea fiction and a selection of prose and letters provides not only a vivid portrait of a colourful and exotic world, but also a full and rounded picture of a superb writer at the height of his powers.

Read more less

The Three Perils of Man is regarded as Hogg's most ambitious work of fiction. The book's extraordinary combination of the fantastic, the funny, the serious and the historically realistic must be unique in literature.The adventures of its characters, told with the author's characteristically bold simplicity, are many, mad, and breathtakingly fast. Ranging from Galloway to Northumberland, the main focus of the book is to be found in the Scottish Borders. Hogg knew and loved the Borders well, and the book is full of their oral tradition and local lore. In his attempt to synthesise this material with history, romance and the high literary ideals of his time, Hogg's nearest modern parallels would be a combination of Tolkien and Iain Banks.Hogg's fusion of traditional folklore and innovative style was viewed as an anachronism by his contemporaries, and it is only now that his work is recognised s one of the most original and masterly in the Scottish canon.

Read more less

Kidnapped - Catriona - The Master of Ballantrae - Weir of HermistonThese four great novels take us deep into Robert Louis Stevenson's imaginative and bitter-sweet relationship with his native country.Kidnapped, and its sequel Catriona, are renowned the world over as supreme stories of adventure and romance. On another level they also explore the subtle divisions of Scottish history and character in the eighteenth century, and (some would say) the present day.The Master of Ballantrae takes a darker and more disturbing turn, with its tale of rival brothers caught in a webof hatred, obsession, love and betrayal which draws them to their end in the frozen wastes of North America.Stevenson's fascination with the divided nature of the human self (most obviously demonstrated in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) appears again in the Weir of Hermiston with its terrible confrontation between a father and his son.With an unsurpassed combination of physical adventure and psychological insight, The Scottish Novels have moved and thrilled readers and writers from Stevenson's contemporaries to the present day.

Read more less

In this haunting poem from the latter part of the nineteenth century, Scots-born writer James Thomson anticipated the modern age's nightmare vision of the city as a place of loneliness, alienation and spiritual despair. In contrast to the late Victorian confidence all around him, Thomson dared to face the possibility that the universe was utterly indifferent to human affairs. The strange and dark images in The City of Dreadful Night have become a landmark of modern literature, for the tomb-like streets and empty squares in this memorable poem preceded T.S Eliot's The Waste Land, and the darker visions of expressionism and surrealism by over forty-five years.Published in instalments in 1874 and then in book form in 1880, The City of Dreadful Night has long been unavailable as a complete text. This exciting new edition is introduced and annotated by Edwin Morgan, long an admirer of Thomson's work, and a leading modern poet in his own right.

Read more less

This book is an autobiographical account of the early years of James McBey, the self-taught boy from a humble north-east village who became one of Scotland's most successful and celebrated artists. Writing with charismatic frankness and realism, McBey describes his passionate desire to be an artist, from his first etchings (printed with the help of an old mangle) to the moment when he left a stultifying job to strike out for Holland to create a life of his own.McBey's journey was not an easy one. Poverty, ignorance, his family's indifference, the petty routines of an Aberdeen bank, his mother's suicide, all these are evoked with gravity, clarity and a lightness of touch - like the etchings themselves - which will long remain in the reader's mind.Introduced by Nicolas Barker, who edited the original manuscripts, this book offers a real-life portrait of the artist as a young man and establishes James McBey as a gifted prose stylist in his own right.

Read more less

First published in 1930 to an unprecedented storm of protest, Catherine Carswell's The Life of Robert Burns remains the standard work on its subject.Carswell deliberately shakes the image of Burns as a romantic hero - exposing the sexual misdemeanours, drinking bouts and waywardness that other, more reverential, biographies choose to overlook.Catherine Carswell's real achievement is to bring alive the personality of a great man: passionate, hard-living, generous, melancholic, morbid and triumphant . . . the very archetype of the supreme creative artist.

Read more less

The Thrie Estaitis was first performed in the mid-sixteenth century to an audience of royalty and commoners alike. With its high style and penetrating political satire, it pressed for reform in Church and State and even in kingship itself with a hilarious masque of vice and corruption in high places.Sir David Lindsay's great play is a milestone in world drama. After almost 400 years it was revived by Tyrone Guthrie in a famous production for the Edinburgh Festival of 1948. Ever since then this masterpiece has been recognized as a key text in the resurgance of political theatre in modern Scotland and it appears as irreverent today as it was in Lindsay's troubled times.This new editon has been fully edited and annotated by Professor Roderick Lyall.

Read more less

Introduced by Donald Smith. Set in Rome during Nero's reign of terror, The Blood of the Martyrs is a disciplined historical novel tracing the destruction of one cell of the early church. With a cast of slaves, ordinary Roman people, exiles and entertainers, it is thorough in its historical interpretation and in its determination to make the past accessible and readable. Written in 1938-9, the novel contains many symbolic parallels to the rise of European fascism in the 1930s and the desperate plight of persecuted minorities such as the Jews and the left-wing activists with whom Naomi Mitchison personally campaigned at the time. With the invasion of Britain a real possibility, she felt compelled to write a testament to the power of human solidarity which, even faced with death, can overcome the worst that human evil can achieve. The Blood of the Martyrs is the least autobiographical of Mitchison's major works of fiction, yet, with its implicit credo, is her most passionately self-revealing.

Read more less

Ill health drove Robert Louis Stevenson from Scotland; the urge for new and adventurous places drew him to the Pacific. There were those at home who would have been happier to see him purely as a spinner of the picturesque, but Stevenson could not close his eyes to the impact of colonialism, the 'stir-about of epochs and races, barbarisms and civilizations, virtues and crimes'.This collection sets three of his imaginative works -The Bottle Imp, The Isle of Voices, and The Beach of Falesa - within the social and political contexts of Stevenson's letters and essays from the South Seas. Island ambience, the clash of cultures, moral ambiguities, all are there, and so too is Stevenson's swift narrative control, giving a true modernity to his prose.

Read more less

This huge novel, closer in scope to a Russian epic than to any English counterpart, opens at the turn of the twentieth-century in the extreme poverty of the Rhinns of Galloway, an agicultural backwater of the southern-most part of Scotland.With a loving regard for the land and its people, Barke traces the lives of David and Jean Ramsay who, full of hope, painstakingly uproot themselves and their family in the search for prosperity. Their efforts to retain respect and a decent way of life are thwarted by unemployment in increasingly hostile circumstances, and a harsh environment inevitably leaves its mark.But a generation emerges to question the authority of an uncaring society and, even as Fascism rages through Europe, a new hope is born.

Read more less

Airtight Willie and Me is a collection of six tales from the underground, all of them characterized by Iceberg Slim's distinctive and unforgettable prose. From the opening story, in which Slim meets Airtight Willie, one of New York's slickest con men, to Satin, a classic tale of revenge in which a heist goes badly wrong, the reader is hooked into a rollercoaster ride through the badlands of urban America. Compelling always, funny sometimes, and typically bleak in their endings, Slim's slices of city life are important social documents that scorch most contemporary into submission. There is no moralizing bullshit, no romanticized illusions, few redemming factors - just straight-up sawn-off shotgun blasts from the 'King of the Ghetto'.

Read more less

Iceberg Slim's third slice of ghetto life is recounted straight from the hip by Otis Tilson, a schizophrenic and ageing drag queen. However, the dominating presence and epicentre of this tragic tale is his suffocating mother - Mama Black Widow.Poisoned by the bigotry and abuse she suffered in early life, she in turn infects those that surround her. The damage she does to all she loves is deeply disturbing, no-one is left unscarred.Set in the dark hell of double standard justice, radical bigotry and criminal economic freeze-out, Mama Black Widow, proves arguably to be the most intense story ever penned by the man whose work has come to be regarded as the epitome of street fiction.

Read more less

The Greek scholar William Lorimer spent the last ten years of his life working on this project. Each Gospel has a different form of Scots to match the different forms of Greek used by the various apostles and scribes, and the vigour and immediacy of the language is everywhere apparent.Transcribed, edited and published by his son Robin Lorimer, this scholarly and dramatically fresh reading of an already familiar text caused a sensation when it first appeared in 1983. Beyond the poetry of the King James version, here are the voices of the disciples themselves, speaking, as they undoubtedly did, in 'plain braid Galilee'.

Read more less

The Bondurant Boys were notorious gangster brothers who ran liquor though Franklin County during Prohibition. LAWLESS is their story.Based on the true account of Matt Bondurant's grandfather and two granduncles, this is a gripping tale of bootlegging, brotherhood and revenge.

Read more less

From Amsterdam to Cambodia, from Rome to Indonesia, from New Orleans to Libya, and from Detroit to Ko Pha-Ngan, Geoff Dyer finds himself both floundering about in a sea of grievances and finding moments of transcendental calm. This aberrant quest for peak experiences leads, ultimately, to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, where, to quote Tarkovsky's Stalker, 'your most cherished desire will come true'.

Read more less

A young girl's midnight séance awakens a long-slumbering malevolent spirit . . .A band of runaway orphans allies with an underground collective of saboteurs and plans a daring rescue of their friends, imprisoned in the belly of an industrial wasteland . . .Two old friends draw closer to their goal of bringing together a pair of exiled toy makers in order to reanimate a mechanical boy prince . . .As the fate of Wildwood hangs in the balance.The third book in the Wildwood Chronicles is a rich, moving, and dazzling story, by turns funny and profound. Both Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis are at the height of their gifts with Wildwood Imperium.

Read more less

A Guardian Best Book of 2014A 2014 Brain Pickings Best Book on Psychology, Philosophy, and How to Live MeaningfullyWhy is it hard to fall asleep the night before an important meeting? Or be charming and relaxed on a first date? What is it about a comedian whose jokes fall flat or an athlete who chokes? What if, contrary to what we have long been told, spontaneity - not striving - is the answer to success? Through stories of mythical creatures and drunken cart riders, jazz musicians and Japanese motorcycle gangs, Slingerland effortlessly blends Eastern thought and cutting-edge science to show us how we can embody a spontaneous way of being and live more fulfilling lives.

Read more less

EVERY ACTION HAS A CONSEQUENCEBec Shepherd is a scientist struggling to lead a good life Ritchie, her brother, is a TV star with skeletons in his closet Alex wants a family if he could only meet the right woman . . . One man has the information to destroy them all

Read more less

Suelette Dreyfus and her co-author, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, tell the extraordinary true story of the computer underground, and the bizarre lives and crimes of an elite ring of international hackers who took on the establishment.Spanning three continents and a decade of high level infiltration, they created chaos amongst some of the world's biggest and most powerful organisations, including NASA and the US military. Brilliant and obsessed, many of them found themselves addicted to hacking and phreaking. Some descended into drugs and madness, others ended up in jail.As riveting as the finest detective novel and meticulously researched, Underground follows the hackers through their crimes, their betrayals, the hunt, raids and investigations. It is a gripping tale of the digital underground.

Read more less

- Private Sidney Phillips- First Lieutenant Austin Shofner- Ensign Vernon Micheel- Private Eugene Sledge- Sergeant John BasiloneThrough the eyes of these five fearless and devoted men, Hugh Ambrose tells the epic story of the war in the Pacific. It is an intimate, personal history of a brutal, unforgiving conflict.

Read more less

'A terrific portrait of Delhi right now' SALMAN RUSHDIE'An astonishing tour de force by a major writer at the peak of his powers' WILLIAM DALRYMPLEWINNER OF THE PRIX ÉMILE GUIMET DE LITTÉRATURE ASIATIQUE 2017WINNER OF THE RYSZARD KAPUSCINSKI AWARD 2017SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2015SHORTLISTED FOR THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF LITERATURE ONDAATJE PRIZE 2015SHORTLISTED FOR THE PRIX DU MEILLEUR LIVRE ÉTRANGER 2016When Rana Dasgupta arrived in Delhi at the turn of the twenty-first century, he had no intention of staying for long, but the city beguiled him - he 'fell in love and in hate with it' - and fifteen years later, Delhi is still his home.Over these fifteen years, he has watched as the tumult of destruction and creation which accompanies India's economic boom transformed the face of the city. In Capital, he explores the life-changing consequences for Delhi's people, meeting with billionaires and bureaucrats, drug dealers and metal traders, slum dwellers and psychoanalysts. These encounters, interwoven with over a century of history, plunge us into Delhi's intoxicating, sometimes terrifying, story of capitalist transformation - one that has repercussions not only for India, but for everybody's future.

Read more less

When Peter Hill, a student at Dundee College of Art, answered an advert in The Scotsman seeking lighthouse keepers, little did he imagine that within a month he would be living with three men he didn't know in a lighthouse on Pladda, a small remote island off the west coast of Scotland. Hill was nineteen, it was 1973 and, with his head fed by Vietnam, Zappa, Kerouac, Vonnegut, Watergate and Coronation Street, he spent six months on various lighthouses, "keeping" with all manner of unusual and fascinating people. Within thirty years this way of life was to have disappeared entirely. The resulting book is a charming and beautifully written memoir that is not only a heartfelt lament for Hill's own youth and innocence but also for a simpler and more honest age.

Read more less

In the 22nd volume of The Complete Peanuts, you'll see the whole gang waiting . . . and waiting . . . and waiting for a bus that never comes. Charlie Brown finally hits a game-winning home run - off Roy Hobbes' great-granddaughter no less! Linus lobbies the White House to nominate Snoopy for an open Supreme Court seat (alas, it goes to Ruth Bader Ginsburg instead). Woodstock discovers his long-lost grandfather's diary, detailing a hard life in captivity (i.e. a birdcage).

Read more less

'Full of human wisdom, this is a psychologically acute and absorbing approach to a very important subject' PHILIP PULLMANIn this inspiring work, Richard Holloway tackles the great theme of forgiveness. One of the most important books on this essential topic, On Forgiveness draws on the great philosophers and writers such as Frederick Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida and Nelson Mandela. Both timely and a timeless modern classic, On Forgiveness is a pertinent and fascinating discourse on how forgiveness works, where it came from and how the need to embrace it is greater than ever if we are to free ourselves from the binds of the past.

Read more less

An old woman is awoken in the dead of night by knocks at her front door. The woman opens it to find her daughter, Doruntine, standing there alone in the darkness. She has been brought home from a distant land by a mysterious rider she claims is her brother Konstandin. But unbeknownst to her, Konstandin has been dead for years. What follows is chain of events which plunges a medieval village into fear and mistrust. Who is the ghost rider?

Read more less