Canongate Classics – serie

Set against the religious struggles of seventeenth-century Scotland, with Montrose for the king against a convenanted kirk, John Buchan's Witch Wood is a gripping atmospheric tale in the spirit of Stevenson and Neil Munro.As a moderate Presbyterian minister, young David Sempill disputes with the extremists of his faith. All around, the defeated remnants of Montrose's men are being harried and slaughtered by the faithful, and Sempill's plea for compassion, like his love for the beautiful Katrine Yester, is out of joint with the times.There are still older conflicts to be faced however, symbolised by the presence of the Melanudrigill Wood, a last remnant of the ancient Caledonian forest. Here there is black magic to be uncovered, but also the more positive pre-Christian intimations of nature worship.In such setting, and faced with the onset of the plague, David Sempill's struggle and eventual disappearance take on a strange and timeless aspect in what was John Buchan's own favourite among his many novels.

Lt. Colonel Jock Sinclair is a rough talking, whisky drinking soldier's soldier, a hero of the desert campaign who rose to his position through the ranks. Colonel Barrow, an officer graduate of Oxford and Sandhurst, had a wretched war in Japanese prison camps. But he has come to take command of the Battalion he has long admired, the one that Jock Sinclair has served in since he was a boy. In the claustrophobic world of Campbell barracks, a conflict is inevitable between the two men and a tragedy unfolds with concentrated and ferocious power.James Kennaway served in a Highland regiment himself, and his feeling for 'tunes of glory, for the glamour and brutality of army life gives added authenticity and humour to this, his first and most famous novel. He died in a car crash at the tragically early age of forty.

In a story which lays bare the strengths and the horrors of the egalitarian Scottish Presbyterian spirit, Ringan Gilhaize looks across three generations to describe Scotland's most turbulent years, from his grandfather's support for the Reformation, to the harsher years of his own sufferings as a persecuted Covenanter in the killing times.Unique when it was published in 1823, and unique to this day, Ringan Gilhaize is an autobiography, a folk history of enormous scope, and a compelling psychological portrait of how idealism can turn to fanaticism.History tells us that John Graham of Claverhouse ('bluidy Clavers') was killed by a stray musket ball at the battle of Killiecrankie in 1689. This is the story of the bitter religious and political conflicts that led to that battle, from the mouth of the man who pulled the trigger.Best known as the author of The Provost, Annals of the Parish and The Entail, Galt shows the full range and power of his writing in Ringan Gilhaize and reinforces his claim to be in the very highest rank of Scottish writers.

The Quarry Wood, although published well before Sunset Song, inhabits a similar world; the progress of its heroine could almost be the alternative story of a Chris Guthrie who did go to university. Compassionate and humorous, the grace and style of Shepherd's prose is heightened by a superb ear for the vigorous language of the north-east.The Weatherhouse, Shepherd's masterpiece, is an even more substantial achievement which belongs to the great line of Scottish fiction dealing with the complex interactions of small communities, and especially the community of women - a touching and hilarious network of mothers, daughters, spinsters and widows. It is also a striking meditation on the nature of truth, the power of human longing and the mystery of being.The third and final novel, A Pass in the Grampians, describes Jenny Kilgour's coming of age as she has to choose between the kindly harshness of her grandfather's life on a remote hill farm, and the vulgar and glorious energy of Bella Cassie, a local girl who left the community to pursue success as a singer, and has now returned to scandalise them all.The Living Mountain is a lyrical testament in praise of the Cairngorms. It is a work deeply rooted in Shepherd's knowledge of the natural world, and a poetic and philosophical meditation on our longing for high and holy places.This omnibus edition of Shepherd's prose works reveals how her sensitivity and powers of observation raise her work far above the status of regional literature and into the front rank of Scottish writing.

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 schoolteacher who is in love with one of this 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.

Widely acclaimed as Massie's finest novel, A Question of Loyalties engages with all the complexities and ambiguities of loyalty, nationality and family as they are put under threat by betrayal, by errors of judgement, or simply friendship.Etienne de Balafré, half French, half English and raised in South Africa, returns to post-war France to unravel the tangled history of his own father. Was Lucien de Balafré a patriot who served his country as best he could in difficult times, or a treacherous collaborator in the Vichy government?Rife with the anguish of hindsight and the irony of circumstance, this powerful book brilliantly explores the ties between fathers and sons and the pains of love and duty in a period of European history that is still characterised by wilful denial and hatred.

A 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.

Features an account of the swordfighter Wallace was to symbolise the cause of liberty and independence to many other countries and cultures in the centuries to come.

Published originally in two volumes in 1890, this extraordinary study of primitive myth and magic, collected from sources around the world, led Frazer to identify parallel patterns of ritual, symbols and belief across many centuries and many different cultures. Frazer's learning inspired a whole generation of ethnographers and comparative anthropologists, and had a particularly powerful effect on many other thinkers and writers such as Sigmund Freud, D H Lawrence, Joyce, Yeats and T S Eliot.