LITMIR.BIZ

Introduced by Edwin Morgan.
A ‘gowk storm’ is an untimely fall of snow in early Spring – a fitting symbol for the anguished story that unfolds. Nearly a hundred years ago, three girls were born to a minister and his wife in a remote Highland manse; the rigid patriarchal structure of the times is set against their approaching womanhood and growing awareness of life beyond the safety of home.
After the disposal by marriage of the eldest, the sisters’ lives reach a new level of intensity. Emmy, the middle sister, finds to her horror that she is falling in love with her best friend’s fiancée. The unfortunate couple become estranged and a tragic outcome seems inevitable in the brooding symbolism of this disturbing story.
The Gowk Storm, published in 1933, was one of many award-winning books written by Nancy Brysson Morrison. It was a Book Society Choice, went into eight impressions and was successfully dramatised.
‘Haunting, lyrical, passionate and a real page-turner, The Gowk Storm is definitely one of my favourite Scottish novels.’ Anne Donovan

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Introduced by Giles Gordon.
Elspeth Davie is one of Scotland’s finest and most underrated 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 daily human condition.
This wide-ranging collection of the very best of Elspeth Davie’s short fiction offers an important reassessment of a wonderful writer.
‘Exceptionally powerful . . . this is a most impressive collection, a work of genuine imagination. And Mrs Davie’s measured, subtly cadenced prose is a pleasure to read.’ Observer
‘Mrs Davie commands a beautifully clear prose style that she can intensify when necessary to touch the hem of poetry.’ Edinburgh Evening News
‘ Shows the skill and originality of the writer in articulating and devising images for human doubts and ambiguities.’ Herald

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Distinguished by irony, compassion and the author's own dry wit, these three novels paint a memorable picture of life in the streets, schools and tenements of Glasgow in the 1950s and 60s. With a unique vision of loneliness, old age, sexual longing, hot young blood and youth's casual cruelty, George Friel's books explore a dark comedy of tangled communication, human need and fading community.
All these elements come together in the humorous parable of greed, religion and slum youth that is The Boy Who Wanted Peace; in the fate of old and disturbed Miss Partridge who is obsessed with the innocence of young Grace; and in the mental collapse of Mr Alfred, a middle-aged school teacher who is in love with one of his pupils.
The humour, realism and moral concern of Friel's work clearly anticipate and stand alongside the novels of Alan Spence, Alasdair Gray, William McIlvanney and James Kelman.

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Tunes of Glory Household Ghosts Silence
This volume collects three of the very best works by James Kennaway, the brilliant young novelist and screenwriter who tragically died in a car crash at the early age of forty.
Memorably filmed with Alec Guinness and John Mills, Tunes of Glory is a grippingly dramatic exploration of the glamour and the brutality of post-war army life as the tensions and conflicts in the officers' mess of a Highland regiment lead to shame and tragedy.
Household Ghosts is a claustrophobic tale of family tension, love triangles and the persistence of the past-one of Kennaway's favourite themes. Set in a country house in Scotland the book is haunted, like the privileged family it describes, by the ghosts of Scotland's own turbulent history.
Taken from completed drafts on the author's desk, Silence tells of the accidental meeting and the complex union between a white man and a black woman in times of racial tension and sexual violence. Set in a North American city in midwinter Kennaway's last and brilliantly succinct novel expands into a universal allegory of suffering and death.

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Born in Jedburgh in 1780, Mary Fairfax was the daughter of one of Nelson's captains, and in common with most girls of her time and station she was given the kind of education which prizes gentility over ability. Nevertheless, she taught herself algebra in secret, and made her reputation in celestial mechanics with her 1831 translation of Laplace's Mécanique céleste as The Mechanism of the Heavens.
As she was equally interested in art, literature and nature Somerville's lively memoirs give a fascinating picture of her life and times from childhood in Burntisland to international recognition and retirement in Naples. She tells of her friendship with Maria Edgeworth and of her encounters with Scott and Fenimore Cooper. She remembers comets and eclipses, high society in London and Paris, Charles Babbage and his calculating engine, the Risorgimento in Italy and the eruption of Vesuvius.
Selected by her daughter and first published in 1973, these are the memoirs of a remarkable woman who became one of the most gifted mathematicians and scientists of the nineteenth century. Oxford's Somerville College was named after her, and the present volume, re-edited by Dorothy McMillan, draws on manuscripts owned by the college and offers the first unexpurgated edition of these revelatory writings.

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Introduced by Douglas Gifford.
This hilarious novel charts the rise and fall (and perhaps the rise again) of Magnus Merriman—would-be lover, writer, politician, idealist and crofter—moved by dreams of greatness and a talent for farcical defeat.
Convinced that ‘small nations are safer to live in than big ones’, Magnus becomes a Nationalist candidate for the parliamentary seat of ‘Kinluce’.
With details based on Linklater’s own experiences in an East Fife by-election in 1933, the way is set for a satirical and irreverent portrait of Scottish life, literature and politics in the 1930s. Nothing is sacred and no-one is spared.
‘A book full of remarkable passages . . . [with a] breathless tempo . . . it is wonderful writing.’ Herald

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