Canongate Books: 273 books

There are still wild places out there on our crowded planet. Through a series of personal journeys, Dan Richards explores the appeal of far-flung outposts in mountains, tundra, forests, oceans and deserts. These are landscapes that speak of deep time, whose scale can knock us down to size. Their untamed...

This collection marks the arrival of a major new talent in Scottish poetry. Kevin MacNeil's voice and vision, while rooted in the Hebridean islands, is open to a wide range of cultures, not only those of Scotland – from Gaeldom to urban Scotland – but to the wider European and American mind and,...

The Fortunate Brother is a dark, atmospheric and compelling novel about the aftermath of a murder in a claustrophobic rural community in Newfoundland. When a body is found in the lake suspicion falls on the troubled Now family. As the mystery unfolds other, far deeper, secrets are revealed. Compassionate...

Alison Jackson goes behind the headlines with a hilarious collection of the year's best stories. It's been quite a year in the world of celebrity... - Wayne Rooney said 'I'm worth it' with his new head of hair; - Charlie Sheen went from losing it to WINNING; - Cameron and Clegg continued their bromance;...

The women of the tiny town of Fetter-Rothnie have grown used to a life without men, and none more so than the tangle of mothers and daughters, spinsters and widows living at the Weatherhouse. Returned from war with shellshock, Garry Forbes is drawn into their circle as he struggles to build a new...

Ever been talked into buying a camel? Or become a burglar by mistake? Or accidentally drugged a friend on a blind date? Keggie Carew has an unerring instinct for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, of putting her foot in it, and making a hash of things. From the repercussions of a missing...

Punchy, acerbic, sharp-witted and above-all, acutely observed, Born Free tells the story of an ordinary family who are all trying to escape from something - and each other. The interactions between Jake, Joni, Angie and Vic reveal a hellish cocktail of adolescent and mid-life crises; the savagery...

After fraudulently winning a writing competition, Sidony Redruth is sent by her editor to write the first-ever travel book on Hy Brasil, a near-mythical island somewhere in the Atlantic, whose very existence has been a matter of debate as late as the nineteenth century. Elphinstone's plot takes the...

The Thrie Estaitis was first performed in the mid-sixteenth century to an audience of royalty and commoners alike. With its high style and penetrating political satire, it pressed for reform in Church and State and even in kingship itself with a hilarious masque of vice and corruption in high places....

Once upon a time in a frozen city . . . strangers fall in love, wishes come true, and lives will never be the same again When his parents split up, and his dad leaves home, a ten-year-old boy begs the sky to help him. The next day an ice storm covers his city. When the power goes out and the temperature...

Lemn Sissay was seventeen when he wrote his first poetry book, which he hand-sold to the miners and mill workers of Wigan. Since then his poems have become landmarks, sculpted in granite and built from concrete, recorded on era-defining albums and declaimed in over twenty countries. He has performed...

Satirical and yet compassionate, Childish Things begins with a funeral at which Gregor McLeod, a retired school-master aged 72, is mourning the death of his wife Kate. It soon becomes evident, however, that McLeod has been something of a womaniser and, despite his very recent (and heartfelt) bereavement,...

Bright Young Things wanted for Big Project.' They're in the prime of their lives but our bright young things are all burnt out. Six sparky twenty-somethings just out of university and working dead-end jobs, they are all bored to tears with their lives and looking for a way out. When a mysterious job...

Thomas Glover arrived in Nagasaki in 1859, just as Japan was opening to the West. Within a few years he had played a crucial part in the overthrow of the Tokugawa Shogunate, providing the rebels with war-winning, Scottish-designed warships, and modern arms. Bankruptcy by the age of thirty was barely...