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Individual Scottish titles |
MLA convention, Philadelphia 2009
Death of a Ladies' Man by Alan Bissett Hachette Scotland By day, Charlie Bain is the school's most inspiring teacher. By night, he prowls the stylish bars of Glasgow, seducing women. Fuelled by art, drugs and fantasies of being an indie star, Charlie journeys further into hedonism, unable to see the destruction his desires are leading everyone towards. One of Scotland's most dazzling young writing talents tackles the modern phenomenon of sex addiction. Dark, funny and deliciously erotic, Death of a Ladies' Man is an intense portrait of male vanity, written with verve and emotional rawness.
The Fanatic by James Robertson Harper Collins It is Spring 1997 and Hugh Hardie needs a ghost for his Tours of Old Edinburgh. Andrew Carlin is the perfect candidate. So, with cape, stick and a plastic rat, Carlin is paid to pretend to be the spirit of Colonel Weir and to scare the tourists. But who is Colonel Weir, executed for witchcraft in 1670. In his research, Carlin is drawn into the past, in particular to James Mitchel, the fanatic and co-congregationist of Weir's, who was tried in 1676 for the attempted assassination of the Archbishop of St Andrews, James Sharp. Through the story of two moments in history, The Fanatic is an extraordinary history of Scotland. It is also the story of betrayals, witch hunts, Puritan exiles, stolen meetings, lost memories, smuggled journeys and talking mirrors which will confirm James Robertson as a distinctive and original Scottish writer.
James Hogg and the Literary Marketplace: Scottish Romanticism and the Working-Class Author eds. Sharon Alker and Holly Faith Nelson Ashgate Publishing Responding to the resurgence of interest in the Scottish working-class writer James Hogg, Sharon Alker and Holly Faith Nelson offer the first edited collection devoted to an examination of the critical implications of his writings and their position in the Edinburgh and London literary marketplaces. Writing during a particularly complex time in Scottish literary history, Hogg, a working shepherd for much of his life, is seen to challenge many of the aesthetic conventions adopted by his contemporaries and to anticipate many of the concerns voiced in discussions of literature in recent years. While the essays privilege Hogg's primary texts and read them closely in their immediate cultural context, the volume's contributors also introduce relevant research on oral culture, nationalism, transnationalism, intertextuality, class, colonialism, empire, psychology, and aesthetics where they serve to illuminate Hogg's literary ingenuity as a working-class writer in Romantic Scotland.
Joseph Knight
by James Robertson
Harper Collins
A gripping, shocking story of history, enlightement and slavery, Joseph Knight confirms James Robertson as one of
our foremost novelists. Exiled to Jamaica after the Battle of Culloden in 1746, Sir John Wedderburn made a fortune,
alongside his three brothers, as a faux surgeon and sugar planter. In the 1770s, he returned to Scotland to marry and
re-establish the family name. He brought with him Joseph Knight, a black slave and a token of his years in the Caribbean.
Now, in 1802, Sir John Wedderburn is settling his estate, and has hired a solicitor's agent, Archibald Jamieson, to search
for his former slave. The past has haunted Wedderburn ever since Culloden, and ever since he last saw Knight, in court
twenty-four years ago, in a case that went to the heart of Scottish society, pitting master against slave, white against
black, and rich against poor. As long as Knight is missing, Wedderburn will never be able to escape the past. Yet what
will he do if Jamieson's search is successful? And what effect will this re-opening of old wounds have on those around him?
Meanwhile, as Jamieson tries to unravel the true story of Joseph Knight he begins to question his own motivation. How can
he possibly find a man who does not want to be found? James Robertson's second novel is a tour de force, the gripping
story of a search for a life that stretches over sixty years and moves from battlefields to the plantations of Jamaica,
from Enlightenment Edinburgh to the back streets of Dundee. It is a moving narrative of history, identity and ideas,
that dramatically retells a fascinating but forgotten episode of Scottish history.
Marie B: A Biographical Novel
by Tom Hubbard
Ravenscraig Press
Marie Bashkirtseff (1858-1884) was a painter, diarist, and semi-clandestine feminist. The daughter of an émigré
Ukrainian family, she grew up in the south of France, a spoiled and sheltered child and adolescent. At eighteen, however,
she returned to her native Ukraine and experienced a kind of epiphany, resolving thereafter to address herself seriously
to the study of painting. Back in France, she enrolled at one of the few Parisian art schools open to women. The novel
charts her struggles with her art and with her own personality with the passage of time, for her health went sharply into
decline. After gaining a prize at the Salon, she met her mentor, the famous Jules Bastien-Lepage, ten years her senior
but also mortally ill; their relationship became equally comic and poignant. In the last years of her short life, Marie
Bashkirtseff's art became increasingly innovative. Had she lived, she might well have established credentials as a
20th-century modernist. How far, though, was she a deluded egotist or a martyr to her creativity or both? Tom Hubbard's
new novel seeks the essence of Marie B., as she pursued her obsessions during the troubled times of late nineteenth-century
France and Tsarist Russia. This is a cosmopolitan tale with an occasionally Scottish accent, not least when Robert
Louis Stevenson makes a cameo appearance in the company of two Russian ladies ...
The Testament of Gideon Mack
by James Robertson
Penguin
When Gideon Mack falls into a ravine while rescuing a fellow minister's dog, he begins a journey that will take him,
figuratively and literally, out of this world. Swallowed up in the roaring rapids of the legendary Black Jaws, he is
assumed dead by one and all, and when he is spit out three days later, somehow alive, the outrageous story he tells
of how he survived is met with disbelief and derision. Gideon claims it was the Devil who saved him, that the Devil
healed his broken leg, engaged him in personal and philosophical discussion, and stole his shoes. Gideon Mack is a man
riddled with paradox: a minister who does not believe in God but comes face-to-face with the Devil, a pillar of the
community who is widely admired while living a lie but denounced as insane when he tells the truth, a man who has
repressed his passions all his life but has an affair with his best friend's wife. In James Robertson's skillful hands,
these paradoxes not only make Gideon a fascinatingly complex and continually surprising character but suggest the larger
issues that underlie his story. The Testament of Gideon Mack takes a multifaceted look at how religious belief manifests
in our particular historical and cultural moment. The novel also poses questions about the reliability of human perception
and indeed about the nature of belief itself. People, the novel seems to suggest, believe what they want to believe.
Gideon claims to find a standing stone on a path he has run for years. One day it is suddenly and inexplicably there.
Or is it? No one else sees it, and when Gideon photographs it — using old film — it doesn't show up. But he touches it,
embraces it, pounds his fist against it, and it is entirely real to him. But then so is the Devil. Readers must decide
for themselves — Robertson is careful not to tip his hand — whether or not Gideon is lying or delusional or, if he is being
truthful and accurate about his experience of the supernatural, what that implies about the nature of reality and the
relationship of belief to perception.
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