Holiday Reading for July from Anna Nicholson

Ah, with the weather we’ve been having lately (though it’s been worse in parts of England than it has been here in Scotland) holiday reading is taking on a whole new hue. Suddenly, the light, frothy confections we had planned to read seem a little, well, out of place when it’s grey and damp outside. So in the spirit of using your holidays to catch up with interesting books you haven’t had time to read during your daily life, here’s a selection of Scottish books to take on holiday. Some will be new and some have been out for a while:

Alice Munro’s The View From Castle Rock is still only available in hardback (paperback out in September this year) but is shaping up to be one of the best Scottish-interest books of the year. A bit slow at the beginning, this family history cum collection of stories is fantastically well written and very good on the stoical, taciturn ways of life experienced by her forebears. Now, stoicism and taciturn characters don’t sound like much of a fun read but it’s a book that gets under the skin. I loved it.

Irvine Welsh is back with If You Liked School You’ll Love Work, a collection of entertaining stories featuring the usual host of lurid characters. If you liked Porno, you’ll love this.

In a League of Their Own is the story of how a small football team, Gretna FC, have made it into Scotland’s Premier Football League. They’ll kick off this summer with a lot of goodwill behind them as we all love the idea of the underdog. (Like Caley Thistle though, it probably won’t be long before they begin taking a few Central Belt scalps.) This is billed as a fly-on-the-wall diary.

Summer wouldn’t be complete without a McCall Smith title and The World According to Bertie will not disappoint his many fans. Based upon his 44 Scotland Street extracts in the Scotsman newspaper, this is the fourth of the series featuring Bertie and a host of other Edinburgh types.

The late, great Hamish Henderson was another Edinburgh fixture. This is the first biography of the man, written by the filmmaker, Timothy Neat. Described as a scholar, poet, pioneer, songwriter and collector of songs, Henderson lived a full life that encompassed a childhood in Highland Perthshire, a Cambridge education, action in World War II, the setting up of the School of Scottish Studies, before becoming an icon of the folkscene of the 1960s and 70s.

New publisher on the block, Quercus, publishes Philip Kerr’s new novel, The One from the Other. Set in post-war Germany, ‘a place where a private eye can find a lot of not-quite-reputable work: cleaning up the Nazi past of well-to-do locals, abetting fugitives in the flight abroad, sorting out rival claims to stolen goods’, Kerr’s novel features Bernie Gunther as a world-weary PI.

As always, I finish the monthly selection with a book that you might not see in the shops: In the Bed of the Duke by Cathy Maxwell sounds like a romp and just the thing for a quiet day at the beach... The blurb runs: ‘The distressed traveller Charlotte Cameron encounters on a rainy Scottish night is absolutely the worst man she could have invited into her carriage! It is Philip Maddox, the reprehensible Duke of Colster.’

Happy holidays.