The latest addition to my website is Ali Smith‘s There But For The. This is another original novel from Ali Smith, telling the tale of Miles Garth, who is invited to a posh dinner party in Greenwich (London) and subsequently locks himself in the spare bedroom, refusing to come out or to talk to anyone … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ali Smith‘s The Accidental. This takes as its theme a partially dysfunctional family: mother, two children, father (second marriage) who are disrupted by the arrival of a stranger out of the blue who changes them all in various ways, both when she is there and after she has … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ali Smith‘s Hotel World. This tells the stories of five women all associated in some way with the Global Hotel, located in an unspecified UK city. The story starts with the ghost of a chambermaid who was killed on the second day on the job when she got … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ali Smith‘s Like. This is Ali Smith’s first novel and a very accomplished novel it is. It tells two related stories. Amy was destined for an academic career at Cambridge University. She had had lesbian relationships and, in particular, she was having an on-again off-again affair with Aisling … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Angus Robertson‘s An t-Ogha Mór: No, Am Fear-Sgeòil air Uilinn (The Ogha Mor). This was the the second Scots Gaelic novel written and the first to be translated into English. It isn’t a very good novel, written in a stilted, forced archaic style and starts off plot lines … Read more
The latest addition to my website is A L Kennedy‘s Serious Sweet. This is another first-class novel from Kennedy, telling the story over the course of one day of two people who are having serious difficulties coping with life. The first, Jon Sigurdsson, is a fairly senior civil servant. He is divorced, does not get … Read more
The latest addition to my website is James Robertson‘s To Be Continued. This is a very funny novel about Douglas Elder, a man who reaches his fiftieth birthday on the day the novel starts and who has all that a man newly turned fifty can reasonably desire, other than a job, a settled relationship and … Read more
The Saltire Society has announced its shortlist for its 2015 literary awards. While the fiction list has several of the usual suspects – Irvine Welsh, Kate Atkinson, the underrated Janice Galloway, whose novel The Trick is to Keep Breathing I read many years ago and plan to reread and review some day, Andrew O’Hagan amd … Read more
The latest addition to my website is James Barke‘s Major Operation. Barke is a Scottish novelist who has sadly disappeared from view, though Canongate did reissue his Land of the Leal. This novel is set in Depression-era Glasgow and is overtly left-wing. We follow the tale of some ship workers who lose their jobs when … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Sophie Cooke‘s Under The Mountain, her second and most recent novel. This is another fine novel by the very much underrated Cooke. This is a novel somwhat reminsicent of The Go-Between, in that it involves a child, sick in bed, during the summer holiday, who witnesses a key … Read more