An Easy Task for Anna Nicholson: June 2007 Titles

This month I'm beginning my usual round-up of up-and-coming titles to relate a brief but telling conversation I had with a Principal Teacher of English from a Scottish secondary school a few days ago.

Wash house in back court of Springburn tenements, 1950s

©Springburn Virtual Museum

• Glasgow Digital Library

The occasion was a family gathering. The teacher was advising my 15 year-old niece on which books to choose for her personal reading bit of the Standard Grade exams. 'Don't choose Pride and Prejudice: too many people doing that,' was the advice. Fair enough, I thought. I suggested she might like to choose a work of Scottish literature. The reply from the teacher: 'That's not a good idea. They're dreary, set in tenements and all that; not suitable to be studied in schools. Look at Sunset Song, it's really depressing'.

I have no nationalist drum to bang but that reply left me completely flummoxed. All the Scottish writers of the past 100 years consigned in one fell swoop to the 'dreary' bin! You can have your own opinion of Sunset Song and some don't like it (I'm not one of them) but...

'Well', continued the teacher, seeing my face, 'name me one Scottish book that could be used for personal reading'.

What an easy task! Dear Reader, there are loads of them, simply loads...

From the perennial favourites such as Robin Jenkins, Muriel Spark, William McIlvanney, Alasdair Gray, Jessie Kesson, Neil Gunn, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, and George MacKay Brown to the big names of the past twenty years - James Kelman, Alan Spence, Janice Galloway, Iain Banks, A. L. Kennedy, Shena MacKay, Joan Lingard, Carl MacDougall, and Candia McWilliam - and the 'newer' writers such as Gordon Legge, James Meek, Alan Warner, Andrew Greig, Irvine Welsh, Andrew O'Hagan, Ali Smith, James Robertson, Louise Welsh, Kevin MacNeil, Dilys Rose, Brian McCabe, Ron Butlin, Jackie Kay, Kirsty Gunn, John Burnside, Suhayl Saadi, Christopher Brookmyre, Des Dillon, Philip Kerr, Anne Donovan and Zoë Strachan, Robert Alan Jamieson, Frank Kuppner, Laura Hird, Toni Davidson, Margaret Elphinstone, Susie Maguire, Christopher Whyte, Sian Preece, Jane Harris, Margaret Burnett, Ruth Thomas, Anne MacLeod, Sara Sheridan, Janet Paisley, Bridget Penney, Ewan Morrison, Stephen Thomson, Alan Bissett, Andrew Drummond... without edging into genre literature such as crime fiction or chick lit. This list isn't exhaustive. And that's only fiction. Don't get me started on the poets...

If there isn't a 'suitable' book to be found amongst that lot, then I'll eat my collection of hats and make a start on my neighbours'.

If there's a lesson here, it's that in the book world in Scotland we haven't done enough to dispel the myths and half-formed impressions among some of the teaching community (not all, of course, but significantly enough) that all Scottish literature is 'up oor close', kailyard miserabilism. Now that's a challenge...

Off my soapbox, on to the pick of books from the coming month and not a tenement in sight...

The Pure Land by Alan Spence is now out in paperback. Telling the life story of Thomas Glover, the man who inspired Madame Butterfly, this is an epic, a love story, and a gem of historical fiction. Spence won the Spirit of Scotland Literature Award with this book.

I chose this title because of its lovely cover and would seriously consider getting this as a gift or even for myself: The Chambers Family Dictionary, a hefty tome weighing in at 1200 pages. Settle your Scrabble arguments or give it to a teenager going through exam angst.

Auld Campaigner: A Life of Alexander Scott (1920-89) is the first biography of the influential poet and figure of the Scottish literary renaissance. The author is David Robb, a lecturer at the University of Dundee.

Edinburgh publisher Black & White are bringing out Simon Biggam's new book, The First Day under their new Chroma imprint. Set in war-torn Europe, the book is a 'gripping and harrowing account of three men's long journey' as part of Operation Dragoon.

Polygon are reissuing Louis MacNiece's I Crossed the Minch. In 1937 the Northern Irish poet and his wife followed in the footsteps of Johnson and Boswell on their Grand Tour of the Hebrides. MacNeice was amused and depressed in turns at what he saw - like J and B, I suppose.

Last of the Line is the new novel from John MacKay, a newsreader on STV. This is his third novel published by Luath and like the other two is set in the Hebrides. 'When Cal MacCarl gets a phone call to his bachelor flat in Glasgow asking him to come to the bedside of his Aunt Mary, dying miles away on the Isle of Lewis, he embarks on a journey of discovery'. MacKay's own family background on the Isle of Lewis gives him an insight into the distinctive culture and ways of the islands.