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, Forbes decides to take Tom on holiday with his own family, with 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...

'The dead rise out of their graves!' These words, though one has heard them before, took possession of my imagination. I saw the rude fellow go along the street as I went on, tossing the coin in his hand. One time it fell to the ground and rang upon the pavement, and he laughed more loudly as he picked it up. He was walking towards the sunset, and I too, at a distance after. The sky was full of rose-tinted clouds floating across the blue, floating...

Introduced by Dorothy Parker. When I was a little girl, the ghosts were more real to me than the people. In this perceptive and unpretentious autobiography Christian Miller recalls her privileged but at the same time deprived upper-class childhood in a castle in Scotland. Through the eye and ears of a 1920s child who seems to have seen and heard everything within the massive granite walls of her home, she gives us a unique insight into what must surely...

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...

Introduced by Magnus Linklater. Angelo, a private in Mussolinis ever-glorious Italian army, may possess the virtues of love and an engaging innocence but he lacks the gift of courage. However, due to circumstances beyond his control, he ends up fighting not only for Italy but also for the British and German armies. With his patron the Count, the beautiful Lucrezia, the charming Annunziata, and the delightful Major Telfer, Angelos fellow characters...

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 Balafr, 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 Balafr a patriot who served his country as best...