This work, originally published in 1981, has been hailed as the most influential Scottish novel of the second half of the 20th century. Its playful narrative techniques convey a profound message, personal and political, about humankind's inability to love and yet our compulsion to go on trying.
"[...]I closed my eyes and enjoyed walking on a grassy hilltop beside a tall, slender, beautiful young woman I had loved when I was fifty. Even in this dream I knew our love was in the past, that my virility was dead and that no beautiful woman would ever love me again. I told her this. She grew ...
Another excellent collection of short stories from the best living Scottish writer. The only reason I don't give this collection a maximum rating of 5 stars is because it's not quite as good as Gray's first collection, *Unlikely Stories, Mostly* which contains my favourite short story of all time...
Two things give this science fiction a Scottish accent: (1) set in one of those places one normally doesn't think of as forward-looking, progressive or otherwise futuristic, in this case Ettrick Forest and (2) it is actually written with more than a smattering of Scots English and dialect. I can ...
Thaw Disappears Thaw opened his diary and wrote: “Love seeketh not itself to please Nor for itself hath any care But for another gives its ease and builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair,” So sung a little Clod of Clay trodden by the cattle’s feet, but a Pebble of the brook warbled out these metres me...
This book contains five signatures – exactly 160 pages. Since the first five stories do not quite fill them I will write another, a true one because just now my imagination can invent nothing short enough. Like other stories in this book it deals with education. I heard it from Angela Mullane, on...
Yes of course we’ve had our troubles, like hundreds and thousands of others recently, and for a while it seemed impossible to carry on. I’d have paid a man to shoot me if I’d known where to find one. But I survived. I recovered. The sun is shining, the birds are singing again, though I perfectly ...
