Reading Scotland
Read and Recommended: Books set in The Hebrides, The Cairngorms, Assynt, Orkney and the Highlands.
Finlay J. Macdonald
A memoir of a childhood on the isle of Harris in the 1930s where the authors mother spun wool for Harris tweed while his father tilled their thirteen acres and tended the livestock. These are colloquial tales peopled with characters like Great Aunt Rachel, 'built like a Churchill tank and with a personality to match.” A way of life which has gone forever.
Norman MacCaig
MacCaig wrote nothing but poems, mostly lyric, short and and infused with passion and clarity. He writes about the people, animals and places in his beloved Assynt, in the north of Scotland. The poems are full of precise local detail and metaphorical daring. What I love most of all is the lack of formal stuffiness to McCaig’s writing.
Peter May
Lewis & Harris has an extremely low crime rate, but that didn’t stop Peter May setting a highly regarded crime series on the island. The Black House is the first of the trilogy and a gripping read. The series has sold over 12 million copies. A great read while tucked up with a whisky on a rainy night on Harris.
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Kat Hill
I’ve had some wonderful stays at Bothys in Scotland. They are that rare thing from the past that hasn’t changed–remote huts in the wilderness whose doors are always unlocked. A good contemporary read that explores the history of these wild shelters and the characters Hill encounters.
Nan Shepherd
An extraordinary book written in 1944 about Nan Shepherd’s experiences in the Cairngorm Mountains. Each time I read it, like Shepherd's landscape, I find something new: "However often I walk on them, these hills hold astonishment for me. There is no getting accustomed to them." The – now obligatory – introduction from Robert Macfarlane sets the scene.
Amy Liptrot
At the age of thirty, Amy Liptrot finds herself washed up back home on Orkney. She swims in the bracingly cold sea and tracks wildlife as she tries to come to terms with the addiction that has swallowed the last decade of her life. A powerful, literary read on how the wild can restore life and renew hope.
Ken Smith
Ken Smith spent four decades in the Scottish Highlands, living alone in a cabin near Loch Treig, known as 'the lonely loch'. While this is a ghostwritten memoir, it draws from Ken’s meticulously kept personal diaries. A refreshing account from somebody who lived in the wilderness and is not a polished writer.
Alistair Moffat
Through 12 walks, Alistair Moffat traverses the lost paths of Scotland that shaped and were shaped by the lives of the people who trod them. Moffat charts a powerful, surprising and moving history of Scotland: a good read.
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