Anna Nicholson Previews: November 2006

Autumn is traditionally the busiest time of year for publishers as they vie with one another to reach the coveted Christmas bestseller spots. Usually, the UK-wide lists are dominated by celebrity autobiographies, cookery books, and children's annuals (we do have a soft spot for the new Oor Wullie). I suspect the bestseller list from BooksfromScotland.com will be quite different.

In France the literary prize season begins around now too, resulting in a huge glut of novels being rushed out – 638 new novels this Autumn season - prompting at least one bookshop owner to raise his hands and say, quelle horreur, they can't cope. In France, booksellers are obliged to take at least one copy of all the new books around, meaning there is a real pressure on shelf space.

This month, I'm recommending some books that would not go amiss in a Christmas stocking.

Two respected poets, Robert Crawford, and Mick Imlah, have edited this month's first book, The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse. A hefty tome of 560 pages, this includes poems in all of the three languages of Scotland. Billed as 'the definitive guide to the poetry of Scotland', this anthology would be ideal for dipping into in quieter moments over the festive period.

Hand, Heart And Soul: The Arts And Crafts Movement In Scotland by Elizabeth Cumming, and published in hardback by Birlinn, looks wonderful. Focusing on the people behind the Arts and Crafts movement, a precursor of Art Nouveau and early modernism, this book attempts to place the Scottish artists and entrepreneurs of the time in a British perspective. Internationally-known figures such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife, Margaret Macdonald, feature prominently but there are also some lovely, more forgotten gems from the era.

Christopher Whatley's The Scots and the Union is a timely new assessment of the Treaty of Union of 1707. Next year is the tercentenary of the event so start reading now if you want to be well-informed. Like most major political upheavals in the past, there is a certain amount of mythology attached to the Treaty: did it have universal acceptance or not? How close was the decision? Here, the author, Christopher Whatley, of the University of Dundee, takes a fresh look at how the event was viewed at the time and presents "new findings that will explode forever the myth of betrayal that has underpinned the 20th-century concept of Britain".