In the third and final book of Jess Smith's autobiographical trilogy, Jess traces her eventful life with Dave and their three children, from their earliest years together. Their adventures and achievements are interspersed with stories of her parents' childhood, her father's 'tall tales' and the eerie echoes of ghosts and hauntings that she has heard from gypsies and travellers over many years. Fans of Jess Smith will not be disappointed with her latest memoir, full of more unforgettable c...

What if the very things you feared were never yours to carry?In UNMASKED: How the COVID Control Agenda Set Me Free, Jess Smith strips away the lies we were told-about safety, authority, and what it means to be "good." Through censorship and a culture drenched in fear, she chose something radical: to trust herself.This is not a book about viruses or vaccines. It’s about what we lost when we gave up our sovereignty and what we reclaim when we remember who we are.Raw, ...

Propulsive and erotic, searching and incisive, Jess Smith's debut collection Lady Smith explores the overlap between private and public violence. These poems investigate the troubled relationship between control and intimacy and deconstruct the messaging women receive about their bodies, starting in childhood. Lady Smith resists the urge to offer a tidy healing narrative, instead revealing the way victims absorb violence and try to live with the long shadows of c...

From the ages of 5 to 15, Jess Smith lived with her parents, sisters and a mongrel dog in an old, blue Bedford bus. They travelled the length and breadth of Scotland, and much of England too, stopping here and there until they were moved on by the local authorities or driven by their own instinctive need to travel. By campfires, under the unchanging stars they brewed up tea, telling stories and singing songs late into the night. "Jessie's Journey" describes what it was like to be one of th...

'Jess reveals a way of life that leaves the reader full of admiration' - Mary HornerScottish Gypsies, known as Travellers or Tinkers, have wandered Scotland's roads and byways for centuries. Their turbulent history is captured in this passionate new book by Jess Smith, the bestselling author of Jessie's Journey and a Traveller herself. Her quest for the truth takes her on a personal journey of discovery through the tales, songs and culture of the 'pilgrims of the m...

Tales from the Tent continues Jess Smith's story from the first book in the series, Jessie's Journey. Jess has left school, and after a miserable spell working in a paper-mill, she abandons the settled life and takes to the roads once more. The old bus has gone, to be replaced by a caravan and campsites. Times are changing, and it is becoming harder and harder for travellers to make a living by doing the rounds of seasonal jobs like the berry-picking. Conscious that the o...

What if peace isn’t something you find… but something you remember?For as long as she can remember, Jess Smith lived on edge — trapped in cycles of fear, panic, and relentless health anxiety. Her fear, also complicated by emetophobia (fear of vomiting).From sleepless childhood nights to the exhaustion of trying to “fix” herself as an adult, she spent decades believing peace was something other people had.But through years of breakdown, awakening and gentle spiritual in...

When widowed Reywen stumbles upon a body in the woods, she must fight for her life and outrun a killer. Hunted to the very doorstep of a not-quite human creature, the real battle begins. Who is the greater danger: the murderer on her trail, or the entity who has given her refuge? Uncovering her own healing nature, the root of the evil who hunts her, and malevolence itself, Reywen is forced to reconcile her fears with her own strengths while struggling to protect those she holds dear. As vi...

This book provides an original and compelling analysis of registration as a dynamic process which makes and unmakes legal identities.Critical legal and socio-legal scholarship tends to assume that registration is a textually mediated act of statecraft which governs through the technology of writing. Taking a different approach, this book develops movement as socio-legal method to illustrate the legal, social, and bureaucratic layers of movement which unfold in everyday engagements ...

'Luminous' The Times'Beautiful’ Caught by the RiverBringing together contemporary Scottish writing on nature and landscape, this inspiring collection takes us from walking to wild swimming, from red deer to pigeons and wasps, from remote islands to back gardens, through prose, poetry and photography.Edited and introduced by Kathleen Jamie, and with contributions from Amy Liptrot, Jim Crumley, Chitra Ramaswamy, Malac...

When Jane Yeadon decided that she wanted to become a nurse, the Swinging Sixties had arrived in style. But before her training the nearest she got to anything swinging was the udder of the cow on their farm in the north-east of Scotland. It was time to leave for the bright lights and some modern life. It Won't Hurt a Bit is the story of Jane's journey from the farm she loved and the schoolwork she hated through to her nurse training and the many adventures along the way. It's a warm, funny...

Discover the heart-warming and uplifting story of a Glasgow tenement urchin finding her way against adversityBorn during the Second World War in Glasgow, Christine Fraser was her mother's eighth child.Growing up with her siblings in a tiny flat, learning to avoid her hardworking, hard-drinking one-eyed father, making a menace of herself in the streets along with the other urchins, Christine lived an impoverished life but never once cared.Until she w...