There are many characters in this book, which wouldn’t matter if they were sufficiently well differentiated to remember – but they’re not, and this is particularly true of the women. The book’s title derives from one of those academic weekends we used to hear about where the main purpose seemed t...
Tam Docherty was only five foot four --but wherever he stood he established a teritory. The people who lived in High Street, Graithnock came there because of poverty, yet Tam moved as if he were there by choice. And his name was not a pleasant sound to more than one manager in the south-west of S...
Featuring the same family, two generations on, as DochertyTom Docherty was 17 in the summer of 1955. With school behind him and a summer job at a brick works, Tom had his whole life before him. Years later, alone in a rented flat in Edinburgh and lost in memories, Tom recalls the intellectual and...
McIlvanney's collection of short stories is a tribute to the ordinary and the mundane, capturing the tiny fragments of people's lives while elevating their hopes, regrets, dreams and musings on to another plane entirely. Some moments make you laugh out loud while elsewhere, the poignancy is heart...
AS SEEN IN THE MOTION PICTURE STARRING LIAM NEESONThe big man is Dan Scoular, a legend of physical prowess in a decaying Ayrshire mining community. When a bare-knuckle fight offers both money and a purpose, he finds it turns into a monumental struggle to keep his heritage and integrity intact.
Detective Laidlaw investigates a case that hits home-his brother's seemingly random death.
This had to be the eighth day of some deformed week, a kind of thirty-first of June. It didn’t fit. Maybe the moon had blown a fuse. They weren’t in the office. They weren’t preparing for a court case. They weren’t on surveillance. They weren’t on the streets soliciting information. They were in ...