Birlinn: 208 books

"Macbeth And All That" is a real-life adventure packed with historical facts about Scotland's infamous king. Journey back to the dark ages where the throne is splattered in blood and death lurks in every corner. Join Macbeth's quest for power - and find out why the truth is very different...

Anne Cholawo was a typical 80s career girl working in a busy London advertising agency, when in 1989, holidaying in Skye, she noticed an advert for a property on the Isle of Soay - 'Access by courtesy of fishing boat'. She had never heard of Soay before, let alone visited it, but something inexplicable...

The journeys in this book are tales of adventure on foot and by canoe through some of the last wild places in Scotland. Each journey is haunted by the ghost of another writer - Neil Gunn, Iain Thomson, Rowena Farre - who has left behind the trace of his or her own experience of these isolated hills,...

Calum MacLeod had lived on the northern point of Raasay since his birth in 1911. He tended the Rona lighthouse at the very tip of his little archipelago, until semi-automation in 1967 reduced his responsibilities. 'So what he decided to do', says his last neighbour, Donald MacLeod, 'was to build a...

This is – in the opinion of many whisky writers and experts – the finest whisky book ever written. It is certainly the first written from the point of view of the consumer and is thus historically significant. But more than that, poetic and polemic in style and with its emphasis on the importance...

In the 30 years between the end of World War II and 1975, the construction schemes of the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board changed the face of the Highlands and brought electricity to almost the whole of the country north of the Highland Line. Nothing on such a scale had been attempted before,...

Who owns Scotland? How did they get it? What happened to all the common land in Scotland? Has the Scottish Parliament made any difference? Can we get our common good land back? In this book, Andy Wightman updates the statistics of landownership in Scotland and explores how and why landowners got their...

Odysseus returns to Ithaca after nearly twenty years, half of it spent as a soldier and the other half as a soldier of fortune. During his absence his wife Penelope remains faithful, despite Odysseus being missing and presumed dead, but when her husband suddenly reappears he confronts those who have...

The Magicians of Scotland will build upon the success of The Magicians of Edinburgh (reprinted five times) and on that book's critical acclaim. Ron Butlin is the Edinburgh Makar and this collection will have an Edinburgh emphasis while seeking to celebrate and interrogate Scotland and its people at...

From NHS overdose clinics to overrun gardens, talking Cambodian treehouses to the teenage perversion of a young Scot on a French Exchange, Pedersen's poetry is a rich and fantastical feast of flavours, landscape and language. On the menu is everything from iced oysters and chateaubriand to pickled...

A young piper, Donald Peter (DP) Gillies, brought up in a remote community in the West Highlands, signs up to join the famous Lovat Scouts. He and his childhood friend are destined for the horrors of Gallipoli and the deprivation of the First World War. After being seriously injured in action, he...

Para Handy has been sailing his way into the affections of generations of Scots since he first weighed anchor in the pages of the Glasgow Evening News in 1905. The master mariner and his crew - Dougie the mate, Macphail the engineer, Sunny Jim and the Tar - all play their part in evoking the irresistible...

Adults may lament that today's children do not sing in the playground, but the kids know better. Hilarious, energetic, surreal, shocking and nonsensical rhymes and songs are as much in evidence today as they always were. In this book, one of Scotland's best-known storytellers introduces hundreds of...

In the house of a Roman Catholic bishop a man lies in a pool of blood. Out in the bishop's diocese the quiet life of parish priest Father Vincent Ross is about to be thrown into turmoil by a terrifying revelation. There are ugly scandals being hidden by the church he has served for so long, and a...