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John Muir

Five works by the naturalist considered the father of the modern conservation movement, documenting the unspoiled beauty of nineteenth-century America.
 
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. —John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra
 
 The name of John Muir has come to stand for the protection of wild land and wilderness in both America and Britain. Born in Scotland in 1838, Muir is famed as the father of American conservation and the founder of the Sierra Club. This collection, including the rarely seen Stickeen, presents the finest of Muir’s writings, painting a portrait of a man whose generosity, passion, and vision are an inspiration to this day.
 
 Combining acute observation, amusing anecdotes, and a sense of inner discovery, Muir’s writings of his travels though some of the greatest landscapes on Earth, including the Carolinas, Florida, Alaska, and those lands that were to become the great National Parks of Yosemite and the Sierra Valley, raise an awareness of nature to a spiritual dimension.
 
 Includes an introduction by Graham White

Canongate Books

Canongate Classics

The Wilderness Journeys

Lewis Grassic Gibbon

This classic trilogy—now in one volume—of a woman’s life on the Scottish coast in the early 20th century “may be read with delight the world over” (The New York Times).
 
 Chris Guthrie, torn between her love of the land and her desire to escape the narrow horizons of a peasant culture, is the thread that links Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s trilogy of novels set in the Mearns of Northeast Scotland. Gibbon interweaves the personal joys and sorrows of Chris’ life with the greater historical and political events of the time, from the Great War to the Depression and beyond.

Sunset Song introduces young Chris, the spirited daughter of a farming family. In the years leading up to World War I, she finds love for the land and for the man who becomes her husband. Chris and her son Ewan survive the war, but when tragedy strikes close to home, it subdues her wild spirit. In Cloud Howe, as a minister’s wife, Chris learns to love again, and we witness the cruel gossip and high comedy of small village life. Grey Granite focuses on her son Ewan and his passionate involvement with justice for the common man. For Chris, with her intuitive strength, nothing lasts but the land.
 
 This edition of A Scots Quair is edited and introduced by Tom Crawford.
 
“A landmark work; it permeates the Scottish literary consciousness and colors all subsequent writing of its kind.”—David Kerr Cameron

A Scots Quair

Alasdair Gray

In this volume of stories and illustrations, the author of Poor Things “perfected the blend of visual and verbal elements [that] characterized his work” (Financial Times).
 
 In “The Crank that Made the Revolution,” an enterprising inventor presents the world with his contribution to the Industrial Revolution: an “improved duck.” When a man splits in two, it isn’t long before his two selves come to blows in “The Spread of Ian Nicol.” And a young boy witnesses a shooting star land in his back garden in “The Star.” In these and other short stories of the strange and fascinating, Alasdair Gray reaffirms his reputation as one of Scotland’s most original and important contemporary writers.
 
 In Unlikely Stories, Mostly, Alasdair Gray combines his surreal and darkly funny stories with original artwork to create a truly unique reading experience. This edition includes a postscript by the author and Douglas Gifford.
 
“The book is a wonder of ingenuity, a varied and rich collection in which Gray's abilities as a visual artist and illustrator are placed not only beside but within the products of his fertile imagination as a writer.” —The Washington Post
 
“Not since William Blake has a British artist wed pictorial and literary talent to such powerful effect.” —Financial Times

Canongate Canons

Unlikely Stories, Mostly

Iain Crichton Smith

These eighteen short stories by the Scottish poet and author of Consider the Lilies “focus on the ambiguities of the inner voice . . . with moments of searing emotion” (Independent on Sunday, UK).

 This collection of the best of Iain Crichton Smith’s short fiction beckons us to listen, not only to the voice of this impeccable author, but to the many voices, both public and private, that he conjures in his characters. Ranging from inner promptings towards self-discovery to the unconscious comedy of everyday speech and even the rantings of near madness, these stories display the peaks of Smith’s wry, surrealistic humor, and his confessional mode in examining the past.

 The longer stories, illustrative of Smith’s novels, are represented by ‘Murdo’ and the seminal ‘The Black and the Red’. There are also outstanding short pieces such as ‘Listen to the Voice’ and the poignant vignette, ‘The Dying’.

 This edition of Listen to the Voice includes an introduction by Douglas Gifford.

“He has a dry pungent humor, a gift for comic invention and a welcome ability to laugh at himself and his background while making a serious point and taking us to conclusions that are anything but obvious.” —The Scotsman, UK

Listen to the Voice

Robin Jenkins

A “witty, affecting novel” of a friendship between a troubled teenager and his well-meaning teacher—and the tragic path it sets them on (Financial Times).

 Thirteen-year-old Tom Curdie, the product of a Glasgow slum, is on probation for theft. His teachers admit that he is clever, but only one, Charlie Forbes, sees something in Tom and his seemingly insolent smile. So, Charlie’s decides to take Tom on holiday with his own family…but his high-minded intentions lead to tragic consequences.

 From one of Scotland’s greatest writers, The Changeling explores how goodness and innocence is compromised when faced with the pressures of growing up and becoming part of society. A modern Scottish classic, this edition includes an introduction by Alan Spence and an afterword by Andrew Marr.

The Changeling

Margaret Oliphant

A haunting collection of short stories of the living and the dead by the Victorian Era Scottish author of Hester and Miss Marjoribanks.
 
 Margaret Oliphant’s stories “of the seen and the unseen” are now considered some of the most remarkable explorations of the supernatural to appear in Victorian times. A prolific novelist, Oliphant said she could produce her supernatural tales “only when they came to me.” And indeed, they carry the eerie power of a visitation.
 
 Twilight uncertainties mingle with philosophical depth in ‘The Library Window’; an extraordinary vision of purgatory is presented as modern city life mixed with metaphysical terror in ‘The Land of Darkness’; and the visitations come en masse in A Beleaguered City, Oliphant’s short novel of the returning dead.
 
 Like the old Scottish ballads where the dead and the living rub shoulders, these remarkable tales are among Oliphant’s finest work, mixing the subtlety of Henry James with the uncanny strangeness of George MacDonald or David Lindsay.
 
 This edition of A Beleaguered City and Other Tales . . . is edited and introduced by Jenni Calder.

A Beleaguered City: And Other Tales of the Seen and the Unseen

Arthur Conan Doyle

These charming adventures of the 19th century French brigadier by the creator of Sherlock Holms are “unjustly forgotten tales by a great master” (Michael Chabon).
 
 Though Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is best known for his immortal character Sherlock Holmes,
 his tales of comic adventure featuring Brigadier Etienne Gerard, a French cavalry officer in the tine of the Napoleonic Wars, were equally beloved in their day. An old man who has retired in Paris, Gerard now recounts his escapades of younger days. In Napoleon’s service, he fights battles, breaks hearts, and confounds the English all across Europe. This volume collects all of Doyle’s Brigadier Gerard stories, originally published in The Strand Magazine between 1894 and 1903.
 
 In The Complete Brigadier Gerard Stories “you will find adventure, action, romance, love and self-sacrifice, hair's-breadth escape and reckless courage, gallantry, panache and a droll, backhand humor that rivals that of P.G. Wodehouse. You will also find yourself, even more than with the celebrated stories of Holmes and Watson, in the hands of an indisputable artist. For more than any other adventure stories I know, these stories have a power to move the reader… unjustly forgotten tales by a great master" (Michael Chabon for NPR's You Must Read This).
 
"The Brigadier Gerard stories display all the narrative gusto of Doyle's more famous Sherlock Holmes, together with an irresistible warmth and humor."—Philip Pullman

The Complete Brigadier Gerard: Stories

Edwin Muir

Tom Gallacher

Gordon M. Williams

J.F. Hendry

Four literary works portraying both the gritty beauty and the brutality of Glasgow and western Scotland in the mid-twentieth century.
 
 Includes:
Poor Tom by Edwin Muir
Fernie Brae by J. F. Hendry
From Scenes Like These by Gordon M. Williams
Apprentice by Tom Gallacher
 
 Introduced by Liam McIlvanney, award-winning author of The Quaker, Growing Up in the West presents four very different and memorably vivid accounts of what it was to be young and growing up in Glasgow and the west of Scotland, from the 1930s to the 1960s. Poor Tom tells of a young man’s struggle to come to terms with the slow death of his brother in the city slums of a culturally impoverished Scotland. Fernie Brae celebrates the growth and education of a sensitive youth in a novel reminiscent of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Gordon Williams’s novel From Scenes Like These tells a grimmer story as its young protagonist eventually succumbs to a culture of drink and violence in which the harshness of life on the land sits next to industrial sprawl. Finally, set in the Clydeside shipyards, the wryly observant and humorous style of Apprentice strikes a happier note from the 1960s.

Growing Up in the West

This “challenging and absorbing” novel by the author of The Cone Gatherers explores evil done in the name of goodness with “a powerful and mordant irony” (The Scotsman, UK).
 
 Set amidst the urban decay of Lanarkshire, Robin Jenkins’s Just Duffy reads like a modern-day Confession of a Justified Sinner. A teenager named Duffy, convinced of his own moral rectitude and appalled at the depravity around him, declares war on society. Ridiculous, yet horrifying at the same time, his campaign builds to a terrifying conclusion. Beset with ambiguity, Duffy is a ferocious indictment of Calvinistic moral certainty, of a struggle for good which results in only evil and destruction.
 
 Exploring Robin Jenkins’s signature themes in stark simplicity, Just Duffy is one of the acclaimed author’s most significant and powerful novels. Its inexorable drive and power bear witness to a modern Greek tragedy played out on a Scottish stage. This edition of Just Duffy includes a new introduction by Margery Palmer McCulloch.

“Stark and hypnotically well written.”—The Irish Independent, UK

Just Duffy

Edward Gaitens

A classic novel of city life in Glasgow and one Scottish family’s dreams and struggles in the years between the Great War and the Depression.

 In Dance of the Apprentices, Edward Gaitens set down what many agree is “the best writing that exists about Glasgow’s badlands.” It tells the story of three young apprentices, their lives dignified with a desire for art and learning and the ideal of reforming the world. But the book also follows the fortunes of the Macdonnel family, and a mother who dreams of social success while struggling to raise her family and her ambitious husband out of slum life (James Campbell, from the introduction).

 Caught in the melting pot of social injustice, revolution, war, and pacifism, this powerful book gives a vivid account of Glasgow from the First World War and into the Depression at the end of the 1920s. Even at its saddest, the humor of life flashes from the page in comic description and witty observation.

 With an introduction by James Campbell

Dance of the Apprentices

John Galt

Two novels by the 18th-century Scottish author that “focus on the foibles and fumbles, the humor and waste of people . . . of political ambition” (The National).
 
 Galt’s two great political novels date from around the passing of the Reform Act of 1832. The Member has claims to be the first political novel in the English language and is a tour de force of wit, observation, and a devastating critique of political self-seekings. Its hero is a Scot, newly returned from India, who purchases a seat in a rotten borough. As a study of the corruption of the pre-reform parliament it is unsurpassed.
 
The Radical is a study of narrow-minded, humor-less fanaticism. Galt’s aim is to demonstrate the fragility of the existing order and the closeness of anarchy to the surface of society. This is the first republication of The Radical since its original edition.
 
 “Galt has dropped from popular currency even more than Walter Scott, but he is an important novelist and warrants reappraisal and new reading.”—The National

The Member and the Radical

The acclaimed novel of brothers working on a Scottish estate during WWII “has a strange haunting poetic quality…a fable of eternal significance” (Iain Crichton Smith).

 As World War II rages through Europe, brothers Calum and Neil work to gather pinecones in the grounds of a Scottish estate. Once the forest is cut down to support the war effort, the cones will be used to replenish what is lost. For simple, mis-shapen Calum, who cannot stand to witness the suffering of others, it is an ideal job far from the terrors of war. But when Calum releases two mutilated rabbits from a snare, he comes face to face with Duror, the pitiless and obsessive gamekeeper. In retaliation for Calum’s betrayal, Duror lays a trap for the cone-gatherers.

 Having grown more cynical than his brother, Neil prophesizes that forces of evil will eventually encroach upon the harmony of their lives. It is a prophesy that comes true when Duror commits an act so brutal it destroys all sense of humanity in the once thriving wood.

 “A masterpiece of concision and terrible pathos,” Robin Jenkins’ The Cone-Gatherers is a haunting story of love and violence, and an investigation of class-conflict, war, and envy (Isobel Murray).

The Cone-Gatherers: A Haunting Story of Violence and Love

This “majestic work of scholarship” by the renowned classicist is “a notable contribution to [Scottish] literary and linguistic heritage” (The Times, London).
 
 The Greek scholar William Lorimer spent the last ten years of his life translating the New Testament into the native language of Scotland. It was a passion project that would become his posthumous masterwork. Translated directly from original Greek sources, each Gospel is written in a different form of Scots to match the different forms of Greek used by the various apostles and scribes, and the vigor and immediacy of the language is everywhere apparent.
 
 Transcribed, edited and published by his son Robin Lorimer, this scholarly and dramatically fresh reading of an already familiar text caused a sensation when it first appeared in 1983. Beyond the poetry of the King James version, here are the voices of the disciples themselves, speaking, as they undoubtedly did, in ‘plain braid Galilee’.
 
“A great literary achievement in its own right . . . [that] not only restores life to Scots but to the New Testament itself.” —The Scotsman

The New Testament in Scots

W. L. Lorimer

Christian Miller

This coming of age memoir offers an intimate portrait of 1920 life in a Scottish castle—“like stepping through the looking glass into another world” (Glasgow World, UK).
 
 “When I was a little girl, the ghosts were more real to me than the people…” So begins Christian Miller’s fascinating autobiography of girlhood in 1920s Scotland. Privileged and yet in many ways deprived, Miller grew up the younger daughter and “substitute boy” of her upper-class parents. With perceptive portraits of daily life at her family’s castle in the Scottish highlands, Miller offers readers a rare and personal insight into the last relics of feudal life.
 
A Childhood in Scotland describes girlhood in a world where shooting came second only to religion, where questions were frowned upon, and reading seen as a waste of time. This edition of A Childhood in Scotland features an informative introduction by Dorothy Porter.

“The book’s fascination lies in its re-creation of life in a big house of the period. This is a book one can live in.”—Daily Telegraph, UK

A Childhood in Scotland

J. MacDougall Hay

“One of the great novels in the Scottish canon . . . that asks profound questions about how our narratives, personal and national, ought to be made” (Scottish Review of Books).
 
 A leech, a pirate, a predator, an anti-Christ, a public benefactor, and the fisherman’s friend; such is Gillespie Strang in this remarkably powerful Scottish novel. Gillespie is the harsh prophet of the new breed of Scottish entrepreneur, prepared to use any means to achieve his insatiable ambition amongst the nineteenth-century fishing communities of the west coast. John MacDougall Hay (1881-1919) was born and raised in Tarbert, Loch Fyne, upon which he based the setting for Gillespie. A Church of Scotland minister, his knowledge of such communities and his somber vision of good and evil shape this, his finest novel.
 
 “J. Macdougall Hay has set a tragic tale, which, for sheer relentlessness, it would be difficult to find a parallel.” —The Times
 
 “A sprawling masterpiece which thunders with truth and authenticity.” —Life and Work
 
 “It is a mighty novel, demonstrating Hay’s command of sensuous descriptive narrative and symbolism.” —Scotsman

Gillespie

John Buchan

Four classic adventure novels starring Scottish hero Sir Edward Leithen from the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps, who “invented the modern spy novel” (New Statesman). 
 
 Sir Edward Leithen, lawyer, politician, sportsman and occasional philosopher, was probably the most autobiographical of John Buchan’s heroes. This collection of four novels, written over a span of thirty years, shows Leithen/Buchan in all his moods—from the urban menace of The Power-House in which “the thin line between civilization and barbarism” runs through London’s West End; to the Highland exhilaration of John Macnab; the twists and turns of The Dancing Floor; and Sick Heart River, where Leithen meets death and redemption in the wastes of Canada.
 
 Buchan’s learning and practical experience took him far beyond the range of the “clubland hero” and these tales lead us to the heart of one of Scotland’s most fascinating and enigmatic writers.
 
 “John Buchan was the first to realize the enormous dramatic value of adventure in familiar surroundings happening to unadventurous men.”—Graham Greene
 
 “Leithen is his most autobiographical [character] . . . It’s Leithen who stars in The Power-House (serialized in 1913), the novel that kicked off Buchan’s run of ‘shockers’—as he called his thrillers and adventure stories. And it is Leithen who brings it to a close in Sick Heart River (1941). If Hannay is the man of empire, all blunt action and luck brought on by confidence, Leithen is the man of the capital, a power broker bent on doing good but also on escaping to the country at week’s end.”—The Wall Street Journal

The Leithen Stories

Robert Burns

This “magnificent and authoritative work” presents the complete verse of Scotland’s National Bard with extensive textual and historical notes (Colm Toibin, The Independent, UK).

 Best known for poems such as “A Red, Red Rose” and “Ae Fond Kiss,” and for the song “Auld Lang Synge,” which is sung around the world every New Years’ Eve, Robert Burns was one of the most important poets of the 18th century. A major influence on the Romantic poetry movement, Burns is still beloved across Scotland, with Burns Night celebrated every January 25th.

 This complete volume of the writer’s poetry and songs includes previously unpublished pieces, draws on extensive scholarship and Burn’s own letters, and offers supplemental information about his life, early hardships, political beliefs, and literary contexts. An extensive glossary of Scots words is included.

“A very fine edition, and the long introduction, which sets out to clear the tangled banks, is alone worth the cover price.”—The Scotsman, UK

The Canongate Burns

Annette Hope

Stories, recipes, and cultural legacy combine in this award-winning book: “recipes, sociology, history and anecdote are woven into a plaid of pleasure” (The Listener).
 
 Scottish cuisine reflects both the richness of the country’s resources and the ingenuity of Scottish people who often needed to be frugal. From the ninth century to the present, from the simplicity of porridge and oatcakes to the gourmet delights of fish and game, A Caledonian Feast offers a fascinating history of Scotland, complete with author Annette Hope’s personal collection of authentic recipes.
A Caledonian Feast is widely acknowledged to be the definitive culinary history of Scotland. Immensely readable and informative, it draws upon many strands of Scotland’s literary heritage, including works by Scott, Boswell, Smollett, and Hogg, as well as agriculturalists, social historians, and specialist food writers like Marian McNeill. It was shortlisted for Scotland’s premier literary prize, the McVitie, and given a Scottish Arts Council Award when first published in 1987.
 
 This edition of A Caledonian Feast includes a superb introduction from Clarissa Dickson Wright.
 
 “Exceptionally wide-ranging, well-organized and nicely put.” —Sunday Times
 
 “A joy to read.” —Sunday Telegraph

A Caledonian Feast

Willa Muir

The collected novels and cultural commentary of one of Scotland’s greatest literary talents and an early twentieth century feminist pioneer.
 
 The author of two classic novels as well as numerous translations of Franz Kafka, Hermann Broch, and others, Willa Muir was one of the finest and fiercest intellectuals of the early twentieth century—even as she was overshadowed by her husband, the poet Edwin Muir. This volume gathers together some of her most important works, representing her many voices and lives, both real and imagined.
 
 Muir’s writing is rich with paradox: though she was obsessively Scottish in subject and style, she openly resented Scotland; though a trenchant champion of feminism, she voluntarily sacrificed her identity to that of the ‘poet’s wife’; and although she was a committed reformer, she never aligned herself with any political or ideological movement. These passionate dichotomies are intertwined in her writing, giving a particular power to her fiction and non-fiction alike.
 
 This collection offers a sense of the diversity of Willa Muir’s oeuvre, including both novels—Imagined Corners and Mrs. Ritche—as well as her provocative essays on gender, history, and culture. It makes possible the re-evaluation of her work and assures her of a deserved place in the Scottish literary canon.

Imagined Selves: Imagined Corners, Mrs Ritchie, Selected Non-Fiction

Elspeth Davie

Twenty-eight short stories by the Katherine Mansfield Prize–winning author: “a most impressive collection, a work of genuine imagination” (Observer, UK).
 
 Elspeth Davie is one of Scotland’s finest and most unjustly overlooked short-story writers. Her prose style is as clear and occasionally unnerving as that of Muriel Spark, yet her work reveals a gentler and more compassionate, but no less penetrating eye for the beauty and the strangeness of the human condition.
 
 In The Man Who Wanted to Smell Books and Other Stories, readers will discover Davie’s wry humor, her ear for the cadences of daily life, and her innate understanding of the depths and absurdities hidden just beneath the surface. With an introduction by Giles Gordon, this wide-ranging collection of the very best of Davie’s short fiction offers an important reassessment of a wonderful writer.
 
"Mrs. Davie commands a beautifully clear prose style that she can intensify when necessary to touch the hem of poetry." —Edinburgh Evening News

Canongate Classics - La serie de libros

Canongate Classics - La serie de libros

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