Birlinn: 208 books
Scotland's Shame
Lockerbie 25 Years On - Why It Still Matters
Language: English
Release Date: October 6, 2013
The bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over the small Scottish town of Lockerbie in December 1988 was one of the most notorious acts of terrorism in recent history. Its political and foreign policy repercussions have been enormous, and twenty-five years after the atrocity in which 270 lost their lives,...
The Drowned and the Saved
When War Came to the Hebrides
Language: English
Release Date: January 25, 2018
**Winner of the 2018 Saltire Society 'History Book of the Year' Award
*“Next morning at about 6 o’clock my mother wakened us to say there had been a shipwreck and bodies were being washed ashore. My father had gone with others to look for survivors ... I don’t think any survivors came...
With the Argylls
A Soldier's Memoir
Language: English
Release Date: June 1, 2014
When Ray Ward died in 1999, his sons discovered an old and dusty manuscript in an Afrika Korps ammunition box in the cellar of the family home in Glasgow. These papers contained a collection of their father's memoirs, which detailed his experiences as an infantry officer during the Second World War,...
The Lowland Clearances
Scotland's Silent Revolution 1760 - 1830
Language: English
Release Date: July 27, 2017
The Highland Clearances are a well-documented episode in Scotland's past but they were not unique. The process began in the Scottish Lowlands nearly a century before, when tens of thousands of people - significantly more than were later exiled form the Highlands - were moved from the land by estate...
St Kilda: A People's History
A People's History
Language: English
Release Date: November 1, 2014
St Kilda is the most romantic and most romanticised group of islands in Europe. Soaring out of the North Atlantic Ocean like Atlantis come back to life, the islands have captured the imagination of the outside world for hundreds of years. Their inhabitants, Scottish Gaels who lived off the land, the...
The Silent Weaver
The Extraordinary Life and Work of Angus MacPhee
Language: English
Release Date: October 6, 2011
In September 1939, groups of horsemen in battledress cantered down a broad, grassy plain on the western edge of Europe. The young men of the Western Isles were going to war again. They included a tall, shy 24-year-old called Angus MacPhee (1916-97). Angus returned from war alive but in chronic mental...
Martyrs
Glendale and the Revolution in Skye
Language: English
Release Date: October 15, 2015
In the 1830s and 1840s the district of Glendale on the island of Skye was swamped by immigrants cleared from other north Skye estates. The resultant overcrowding and over-use of land caused simmering discontent - not against the incomers, but against the landowners, who regarded their tenants as no...
by Ian Buxton
Language: English
Release Date: June 14, 2018
Language: English
Release Date: June 14, 2018
Rum, once the poor relation of the spirit world, has undergone a revival and is no longer seen just as the preferred tipple for tipsy pirates. The craft drinks movement has certainly stimulated the rum world, with high numbers of new artisan rum brands launching around the world in the last few years....
Nicola Sturgeon
A Political Life
Language: English
Release Date: March 23, 2015
How did working-class girl from Ayrshire become one of Scotland and the UK's most prominent politicians?Identified as a rising star by the SNP leadership shortly after she joined the party as a teenager, when the Nationalists formed their first Scottish Government in 2007 Nicola Sturgeon swiftly became...
Southern Comfort
The Story of Borders Rugby
Language: English
Release Date: November 1, 2011
For the last 130 years, the Borders has produced a long line of international class rugby players, out of all proportion to the area's small population, and has long been considered the heartland of Scottish rugby. Featuring interviews with many of the leading luminaries of Borders rugby, Neil Drysdale...
The Pocket Guide to Whisky
Featuring the Whisky Tube Map
Language: English
Release Date: May 20, 2017
The ever-expanding world of whisky can be a daunting one, with a deluge of new brands, distilleries and literature on the subject making it all but impossible for the amateur whisky drinker to find their feet in the industry. Following on from the bestselling Pocket Guide to Wine, Blair Bowman provides...
by Katharine Stewart
Language: English
Release Date: August 8, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: August 8, 2013
A real classic among Highland books, "A Croft in the Hills" captures, in simple, moving descriptions, what it was really like trying to make a living out of a hill croft fifty years ago. A couple and their young daughter, fresh from city life, immerse themselves in the practicalities of...
Set Adrift Upon the World
The Sutherland Clearances
Language: English
Release Date: October 15, 2015
They would be better dead, they said, than set adrift upon the world. But set adrift they were - thousands of them, their communities destroyed, their homes demolished and burned. Such were the Sutherland Clearances, an extraordinary episode, involving the deliberate depopulation of much of a Scottish...
Old Skye Tales
Traditions, Reflections and Memories
Language: English
Release Date: July 13, 2017
A compilation of lore, legend, tradition and incident from the Isle of Skye. It contains a large amount of information on the geography of the island (particularly the north) along with sections on crofting, the Church, local superstitions, sayings, second sight and even local characters past and...