BOOKS


In this psychological thriller, for fans of Gillian Flynn and Helen FitzGerald, a woman is released after 25 years in prison. Feared and vilified, Ava seeks to build a new life with a new name, but soon finds that she is being followed.


Sofia Slater Auld Acquaintance Swift, 3rd November, £12.99, HB, 9781800750470 You could hardly ask for a chillier atmosphere than midwinter on a Hebridean island, with an incoming storm to boot. In this claustrophobic thriller, Slater’s début, Millie is invited by her colleague to celebrate new year, and soon finds herself trapped with a strange group of guests.


Ian Rankin The New John Rebus Thriller Orion, 13th October, £20, HB, 9781398709355 An annual affair—Ian Rankin will be back with another Rebus. Details to be announced.


Poetry


Country Focus: Scotland Category Preview


the first time, or to read it with new eyes.


J L Williams Origin Shearsman, March, £10.95, PB, 9781848618053 A child comes into the world at the same time as a virus spreads through it. Beginnings and ends share a root in Williams’ fourth collection. These poems uncover the most basic and most complicated forms of love, hovering elegantly around the almost unbearable vulnerability of life itself.


Jay Gao Imperium Carcanet, 25th August, £11.99, PB, 9781800172470 Gao’s début collection arrives buoyed by innova- tion. Writing as a Scottish Chinese poet, as well as a critic and editor, Gao’s poems offer one original perspective after another, be it working through the memory of trauma or pulling rugs under the present moment to reveal something new.


Andrés N Ordorica At Least This I Know 404 Ink, out now, £9.99, PB, 9781912489466 Ordorica’s début collec- tion, much praised already, is a celebration of belonging beyond strict boundaries, as much a love letter to distant family and queer love, as an incantation of certainty and rootedness within a migratory self, with poems full of joy and embracing of contradiction.


Alasdair Gray & Dante Alighieri Dante’s Divine Trilogy Canongate Canons, out now, £14.99, 9781786897022 Gray’s versions of Dante’s classic, in “Englished prosaic verse”, is now available with Hell, Purgatory and Paradise all in one volume. It’s a trea- sure, lyrical and modern, by one of Scotland’s greats—an opportunity to encounter the poem for


32 18th February 2022


Kayo Chingonyi (ed) More Fiya: A New Collection of Black British Poetry Canongate, 19th May, £14.99, HB, 9781838855307 We can’t wait to get our hands on this goldmine of essential work by a cross- generational selection of Black British poets. The anthology is edited by the phenomenal poet and DJ Kayo Chingonyi, author of, most recently, A Blood Condition, conjured as his dream mixtape.


Alycia Pirmohamed Another Way to Split Water Polygon, 2nd September, £9.99, PB, 9781846976032 The début collection from 2020’s Edwin Morgan Poetry Award winner is a broad-ranging, intimate book that distills and expands notions of iden- tity, faith, migration and belonging, all woven with a vocabulary of intimate natural landscapes and an affinity with the non- human world.


Jenni Fagan The Bone Library Polygon, 4th August, £9.99, PB, 9781846975929 This collection is Fagan’s second book to come out this year, and a very different beast, although equally permeated with the author’s distinctive fierceness and rare ability to illuminate the over- shadowed. It was written during her time as writer in residence at the Old Dick Vet Bone Library.


History & politics


investigating issues regarding race, nation- hood, media, resistance, creativity, inequality and ideology.


aiming to inspire change, hope and imagination.


Gregor Gall (ed) A New Scotland: Building an Equal, Fair and Sustainable Society Pluto, 20th May, £14.99, PB, 9780745345062 In A New Scotland, leading activists and academics lay out the blueprints for radical reform, showing how society can be transformed by embed- ding values of democracy, social justice and environ- mental sustainability into a coherent set of policy ideas.


Gerry Hassan Scotland Rising: The Case for Independence Pluto, 20th September, £14.99, PB, 9780745347264 The Scottish indepen- dence issue is one of the pivotal questions facing British politics and the future of the United Kingdom. It is also one of the most contentious and misunderstood. In Scotland Rising, Gerry Hassan makes his case for independence.


Francesca Sobande & Layla-Roxanne Hill Black Oot Here: Black Lives in Scotland Bloomsbury, 2nd November, PB, 9781913441340 I’m thrilled to see Sobande, co-editor of the terrific To Exist is to Resist: Black Feminism in Europe, collaborating with Hill to give us Black Oot Here. The first book of its kind, it focuses on the lives of Black people in Scotland from the late 20th century to the present,


Clare Hunter Embroidering Her Truth: Mary, Queen of Scots and the Language of Power Hodder & Stoughton, 17th March, £20, HB, 9781529346244 In an age when textiles expressed power, Mary, Queen of Scots exploited them to emphasise her female agency. Clare Hunter’s cultural biogra- phy blends history, politics and memoir to tell the story of a queen in her own voice.


Chitra Ramaswamy Homelands: The History of a Friendship Canongate, 7th April, £16.99, HB, 9781838852665 Ramaswamy’s curious, compassionate history of a friendship is utterly captivating. Bringing a journalist’s eye to an unlikely friendship, she delivers a story of migra- tion, antisemitism, racism, family, belonging, grief and resilience.


James Crawford Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World Canongate, 4th August, £16.99, HB, 9781838852023 Combining history, travel and reportage, The Edge of the Plain takes readers through the history of borders. A story told in four parts—“Making”, “Moving”, “Crossing” and “Breaking”—Crawford explores a different aspect of the life cycle and experience of borders all around the world and throughout history.


Val McDermid & Jo Sharp (ed) Imagine a Country: Ideas for a Better Future Canongate, 4th August, £9.99, PB, 9781838857646 This collection of essays on future Scotland, edited by McDermid and Sharp, is finally in paperback! A terrific collection of ideas, dreams and ambitions,


Murray Pittock Scotland: The Global History, 1600 to the Present Yale, August, £25, HB, 9780300254174 Pittock’s history of Scotland, from 1600 to the present, situates the country within the context of the British Empire and Europe, and explores its past and present from an interna- tional perspective.


Jennifer Morag Henderson Daughters of the North: Jean Gordon and Mary, Queen of Scots Sandstone, 17th March, £24.99, HB, 9781913207755 Mary, Queen of Scots’ marriage to the Earl of Bothwell is notorious. Less known is Bothwell’s first wife, Jean Gordon, who extricated herself from their marriage and survived the intrigue of the Queen’s court. Daughters of the North reframes this turbulent period in history by focusing on Jean and her lasting legacy to the Earldom of Sutherland.


where the events that shaped her life took place and examines the part Scotland, and its tumultu- ous court and culture, played in her downfall.


Edward J Cowan Northern Lights: The Arctic Scots Birlinn, 1st September, £30, royal HB, 9781780277875 A mammoth tome chart- ing the contribution to Arctic exploration made by the Scots, Scotch Irish, the whalers and the Inuits.


Alex Renton Blood Legacy: Reckoning with a Family’s Story of Slavery Canongate, 5th May, £10.99, PB, 9781786898890 Through the story of his own family’s history as slave and plantation owners, Alex Renton looks at how we owe it to the present to understand the legacy of the past. A criti- cally acclaimed, deeply humane social history, now in paperback.


Stacey Clare The Ethical Stripper: Sex, Work and Labour Rights in the Night- time Economy Unbound, March, £9.99, PB, 9781789651331 Clare’s powerful book takes a detailed look at the sex industry—the real- ity of the work, the history of licensing and regula- tion, feminist themes and stigma. She offers an unapologetic critique and searing indictment of exploitation, and raises the rights of sex workers to the top of the agenda.


Rosemary Goring Homecoming: Scottish Years of Mary Queen of Scots Birlinn, 4th August, £20, HB, 9781780277233 Goring tells the story of Mary’s Scottish years through the often dramatic and atmospheric locations and settings


James Hunter Insurrection: Scotland’s Famine Winter Birlinn, 3rd March, £12.99, PB, 9781780276786 When Scotland’s 1846 potato crop was wiped out by blight, the country was plunged into crisis. Hunter’s history maps starvation and the brutal repression and critical gains of mass protest at the cost of the oatmeal that replaced potatoes as people’s basic foodstuff. A timely release of the paperback.


Gavin McCrone After Brexit: The Economics of Scottish Independence Birlinn, 3rd March, £8.99, PB, 9781780277622 Economist McCrone offers a potentially controversial take on the possible consequences of inde- pendence in Scotland, in a much-changed political and economic landscape since the 2014 referendum.


Andrew Jeffrey A Taste for Treason: The Letter That


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