There are plenty of ‘Books Of The Year’ lists around this time competing for your time and attention, but we like to think that Scots Whay Hae!’s selection is one for the more discerning book lover with something for everyone. It’s a good old-fashioned Top Ten which this year features dystopian sci-fi, historical fiction, northern noir, coming-of-age, unconventional travelogue, environmental thrills, the birth and death of love, psychological mystery, politics, pop music, per

*This year’s Aye Write! has been postponed. For full details go to https://www.ayewrite.com/Pages/default.aspx* From today (12th – 29th) Glasgow’s Book Festival Aye Write! is the only show in town for lovers of fact, fiction, poetry, prose – autobiography, biography, comics, and any other form of writing that takes your fancy. The vast majority of events are at the festival’s spiritual home of The Mitchell, and it is only right that Glasgow’s most famous library is the focal

If you are familiar with the writer Catherine Carswell there is a good chance it is for her work as the biographer of D.H. Lawrence, the Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio, and most famously, and for some controversially, of Robert Burns. Her 1930 book The Life of Robert Burns prompted protests and death threats, including a bullet in the post, with many Burns’ fundamentalists accusing her of damaging the poet’s reputation. Aside from her non-fiction Carswell also wrote two ex

Running two narratives throughout a novel can be risky. They have to be distinct and equally engaging or readers will rush through one to get back to their prefered story. It’s a delicate balancing act but when it works, as with Ajay Close’s recent The Daughter Of Lady Macbeth, then it gives you two stories for the price of one, each of which feed into and enhance the other. J. David Simon’s latest novel, A Woman Of Integrity, gets the balance right as he moves between the e

It’s a fear of many children that they are going to grow up to be “just like your mother/father”. This is often stated as a simple comment from people who likely mean it as a compliment, albeit one with a touch of mischief, but it strikes at the core of something vital in us all. Even if there is admiration and love, the fear is not that we are like our parents on some superficial level, but that we are doomed to share their failings and destined to repeat their mistakes. It’