Anna Nicholson Previews: October 2006

Here goes... my very first blog, hosted by BooksfromScotland.com. They've asked me to take a look at the books that haven't been published yet - not so much hot off the presses, as still on the presses. These will be personal selections, beginning with three titles.

I'm going to start with the audio CD by Carol Ann Duffy, Rapture. The book had a lovely, unusual cover: a red and gold affair which reminded me the books we had in school in the 1960s called 'Wide Range Readers' (anyone still remember them?). Tracing the arc of a love affair, Rapture was designed to be read in one sitting and I think the audio CD works well if it's listened to in the same way. Carol Ann Duffy is one of our best living poets though I know sometimes that we can stretch the 'Scottish' tag too far. Born in Glasgow but raised in England and still living there, Duffy is of Scottish parentage.

Stretching again, this time over the Atlantic, we come to Alice Munro who's one of the best exponents of the short story in English. Her latest book, The View from Castle Rock is part family memoir, part fiction: a beautifully-written book telling of Scottish emigrants and what happened to them when they arrived in the New World. Alice Munro's great-great-great grandfather, James Laidlaw, emigrated from the Ettrick Valley and it is the family stories, half-remembered, which give shape to the book.

My last choice is The Enlightenment and The Book: Scottish Authors and their Publishers in 18th-century Britain, Ireland and America by Richard Sher. This is not one for the general reader: it's from an academic press, The University of Chicago Press, but it's a must for those interested in the history of the Book, the history of Reading, and the history of Publishing. There has always been a tension between authors and publishers - a tugging of the blanket either way - as one critic puts it, and the period of the Enlightenment forms a great backdrop to that.