A 'gowk storm' is an untimely fall of snow in early Spring - a fitting symbol for the anguished story that unfolds. Nearly a hundred years ago, three girls were born to a minister and his wife in a remote Highland manse; the rigid patriarchal structure of the timesis set against their approaching womanhood and growing awareness of life beyond the safety of home.After the disposal by marriage of the eldest, the sisters' lives reach a new level of intensity. Emmy, the middle sister, ...

'Poverty is a very exacting teacher and I had been taught well'The post-war urban jungle of the Glasgow tenements was the setting for Molly Weir's childhood. From sharing a pull-out bed in her mother's tiny kitchen to running in terror from the fever van, it was an upbringing that was cemented in hardship. Hunger, cold and sickness was an everyday reality and complaining was not an option.Despite the crippling poverty, there was a vivacity to the tenements ...

In Hanky Park, near Salford, Harry and Sally Hardcastle grow up in a society preoccupied with grinding poverty, exploited by bookies and pawnbrokers, bullied by petty officials and living in constant fear of the dole queue and the Means Test. His love affair with a local girl ends in a shotgun marriage, and, disowned by his family, Harry is tempted by crime. Sally, meanwhile, falls in love with Larry Meath, a self-educated Marxist. But Larry is a sick man and there are other more powerful ...

From the author of “The Snow Goose”.“I was aware, from the very beginning, that I was a most unusual cat…”Thomasina is the beloved pet cat of 7-year-old Mary Ruadh, whose strict father is the town's vet. When Thomasina falls ill, her father sees no other option but to put the cat down. Heartbroken by his cruelty, Mary stops speaking to her father and falls dangerously ill herself.Meanwhile, Thomasina is rescued by Lori, a young woman who lives alone in an isolated gl...

A VINTAGE MURDER MYSTERYRediscover Gladys Mitchell – one of the 'Big Three' female crime fiction writers alongside Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers.The famous psychoanalyst and detective Dame Beatrice Bradley and her feisty secretary, Laura, travel to Scotland for a conference. But when a series of mishaps lead Laura to the island of Tannasgan, she finds herself at the mercy of some menacing Scottish hospitality. Her strange adventure piques the interes...

'Half Scotland sniggered and the other half scowled, when in letters to the Scotsman and the Glasgow Herald, I put forward my suggestion that prisoners in Scottish jails be allowed to wear their kilts as their national birthright if such be their wish.'From his origins as an illegitimate child in the slums of Glasgow, Fergus Lamont sets out to reclaim his inheritance and to remake his identity as soldier, poet and would-be aristocrat.Covering the years fro...

Arthur Morrison's The East End Trilogy gathers three landmark works of late-Victorian urban realism: Tales of Mean Streets, A Child of the Jago, and To London Town. Together they anatomize working-class life in London's East End with a style at once laconic, exacting, and morally unsentimental. Rejecting picturesque poverty and melodramatic reformism, Morrison employs sharp observation, compressed dialogue, and naturalistic detail to place his fiction within the fin-de-siècle debates over ...

The famous Dr Finlay storiesAdventures of a Black Bag represents a selection of A J Cronin’s best stories – stories which are tragic, funny and wry, each revolving around two doctors whose tremendously popular TV and radio series have made them household names: Dr Cameron and Dr Finlay.These stories have that universal appeal which has become A J Cronin’s trademark, established by bestsellers such as Hatter’s Castle, The Stars Look Down and Th...

This huge novel, closer in scope to a Russian epic than to any English counterpart, opens at the turn of the century in the extreme poverty of the Rhinns of Galloway, an agricultural 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 ar...

The second of Buchan's three Dickson McCunn books and is set in south west Scotland in the Dumfries and Galloway region in the 1920s.

Eastward in Clerkenwell lies the Mulberry Pleasure Garden: six acres of leafy walks, colonnades and pavillions. In this bosky setting parade a variety of characters of awesome granduer, innocence and evil - and all are subject to a ring of blackmail terror.

This is the first ever complete collection of all Buchan's shorter Scottish fiction. Set largely in his beloved Borders, these stories and novellas show the full range and depth of Buchan's writing. Featuring shepherds, poachers, gamekeepers and drovers, they are worlds away from the tales of aristocratic adventure with which he is so often associated.Shot through with characters and places he returned to in his full-length fiction, the Buchan that emerges from this collection is a very di...