Our 2010 titles
A list of our 2010 titles follows. At least two months prior to the publication date for each book, the author and book pages will be active and can be accessed by clicking on the book title/cover or the author's name. At that time the book can be pre-ordered, and, exclusively to this website, will be sent out one month prior to publication date.
All of our 2010 books will be 'B' format paperbacks - 198x130mm (with the exception of To the Islands, which will be demy - 216x138mm) and will have cover flaps and coloured endpapers. As always, all of our books are printed on Forest Stewardship Council-accredited paper.
MISS THING by Nora Chassler
Published January 4;
9781906120467;
£9.99
To visit the book page, read an extract and pre-order, please click here.
To visit Nora Chassler's author page, please click here.
To download an Advance Information Sheet, click here.
Andromeda, a beautiful teenage girl whose mother has just killed herself, and Sam, a failed thirty-something writer in a miserable marriage, spy on each other across the interior courtyard of their New York apartment building. Through their diaries we learn just how much these two lost souls have in common. When school lets out for the summer, what promises to be an exciting modelling career leads Andromeda to prescription-drug abuse and misery. On the hot night when Sam rescues her from the grips of a security guard at a shop where she's been caught shop-lifting, love apparently blooms. A variety of written artefacts introduce a narrative chorus of other voices that includes Sam's money-obsessed wife, Andromeda's best friend - a gay homeless drunk with whom she passes her days cutting school on a park bench, a neurotic teacher of Kafka, Andromeda's boy-crazy grandmother, and Sam's 'plasticated' mom.
Straddling the literary territory between social satire and feminist cautionary tale, Miss Thing is both a serious commentary on the not-so-clearcut differences between reader and writer, and an anti-novel that's a foil for love stories and the facile definitions they peddle.
‘Nora Chassler has written an original and exuberant first novel. With a beguiling mix of voices, it's a romance, a mystery, and a coming of age story set in New York City. Her writing is fresh, poignant, wide-awake – and very funny.’ – Galaxy Craze
‘Windblown, storm-tossed, passionate and electric, Miss Thing is exceptionally compelling fiction. It is also the first time you'll encounter the name Nora Chassler. It won't be the last.’ – Alan Furst
Nora Chassler grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and attended state schools. She graduated from Hunter College where she earned a degree in English and Film Studies. She has worked as a fashion model, a Repatriation Case Worker and a housewife. She now lives in Dundee, Scotland, with her partner, the poet Don Paterson, and her daughter, Frances. She is working on her second novel.
HOMECOMINGS by Donald Paterson
Published March 1;
9781906120481;
£9.99
To visit the book page, read an extract and pre-order, please click here.
To visit Donald Paterson's author page, please click here.
To download an Advance Information Sheet, click here.
Rona McPherson, a newly divorced woman in present-day Aberdeen, uncovers in her attic the dusty old diary of a young man, Hugh Ross. Through the beautifully crafted changes in Hugh’s language and view of the world as his life expands into new experiences and new continents, the diary allows us an unusually intense and intimate insight into the world of an emigrant crofter in the late nineteenth century.
Hugh’s story begins on a croft in the far north of Scotland. Inspired by the arrival of a new, modern-thinking minister, Hugh and his two best friends make the fateful decision to cross to the other side of the world and begin a new life in America. His life lurches from crisis to crisis: the shocking voyage on the Lady Grey; his arrival in the Canadian port town of Pictou; his grim, dark days in Chicago; his journey west to the ruthless thriving Californian gold-mining town where he loses what innocence he had left. And then Hugh joins the American army in Fort Tejon – where he hopes, finally, to be reunited with the girl he was in love with before he left home so many years before. At the final turn of the page, we discover just how Hugh and Rona’s stories are so inextricably linked, how we can never escape our past, and how our ancestors are as much a part of us as those who people our daily lives.
'Donald Paterson is a writer of litheness, humanity, wisdom and ambition, and a truly great storyteller, whose take on life is artful and whose take on art is marvellously alive. You won't want this novel to end.’ – Ali Smith
Donald Paterson was born in Motherwell, but grew up in Tain in the Scottish Highlands. After studying at Aberdeen University, he taught for many years in Aberlour and, more recently, in Inverness. Donald lives with his wife Val in Fortrose, on the Black Isle, where the dolphins swim only a short evening walk away. This is his first novel.
SMALL EXPECTATIONS by Donald S. Murray
Published March 1;
9781906120504;
£9.99
To visit the book page, read an extract and pre-order, please click here.
To visit Donald S Murray's author page, please click here.
To download an Advance Information Sheet, click here.
Small Expectations is a collection of linked short prose pieces and poetry. Digressively and figuratively, it tells the story of a character born on the Outer Hebrides, steeped in myth, history and Gaelic, who is then educated for work on the mainland. The character's life thereafter has two poles, and Murray cleverly juxtaposes these strange attractors, bringing the power of ancient myth into the modern world with imagination and great humour.
‘This is an edgy, unsettling, fragmented collection of poems and prose – satires, twisted myths, darkly humorous fictions, poignant reflections on language loss – through which Donald S. Murray explores the uneasy space between Gaelic and English, between the strengths of an island community and its limitations, between the lives we have and the possible lives that escape us. It’s fine, assured writing, full of contradictions, dichotomies and ironies, and we should cherish its courage and honesty.’
– James Robertson
‘This is a very fine collection of stories and poems full of imagination and humour – the humour ranging from the hilarious to the sardonic. There is a finesse and craft to the prose and poetry which rings true to many an islander’s experience. This is a writer who has been and seen. The collection is a tour de force, a distillation, arising from a living imagination of Hebrideans’ experience at home and as émigré. The reader will never look at porridge or mackerel in quite the same way again!’ – Maoilios Caimbeul
Donald S. Murray was born in Ness in the Isle of Lewis. An author, teacher and journalist, his poetry, prose and verse has been shortlisted for both the Saltire Award and Callum Macdonald Memorial Award. Published widely, his work has also appeared in a number of national anthologies and on BBC Radio 4 and Radio Scotland. He lives and works in Shetland.
GIVE + TAKE by Stona Fitch
Published April 26;
9781906120498;
£9.99
To visit the book page, read an extract and pre-order, please click here.
To visit Stona Fitch's author page, please click here.
To download an Advance Information Sheet, click here.
Ross Clifton is a brilliant jazz pianist – and an even more talented thief. He steals millions of dollars in diamonds and BMWs and gives all the money away. But his life as a latter-day Robin Hood is about to come to an abrupt end. Fast, funny, and felonious, Give + Take takes you on an economic shakedown cruise.
'Give + Take is a smart and original novel that flies from beginning to end. An odd hybrid – part noir, part anti-capitalist screed – its voice is both seductive and addictive. A real discovery.'
– Richard Price, author of Lush Life
'A fresh, funny and deeply subversive novel from a writer with important things to say about our consumer culture.'
– Russell Banks, author of The Sweet Hereafter
'It is pure wicked fun, falling in with the players and scammers of Give + Take. Stona Fitch hits all the right notes in this sly, smart and driving book.'
– Jess Walter, Edgar Award-winning author of Citizen Vince and The Zero
'Wickedly funny, Give + Take is a virtuoso novel, one whose heart beats loudly and with its own beautifully idiosyncratic rhythms.'
– Megan Abbott, author of The Song Is You
'Give + Take is a brilliant concept and an equally brilliant novel. I loved it. Fitch writes about music and its performance with what I can only assume is an insider's knowledge. If he doesn't play piano himself I'll eat my hat. He also has an appealing off-kilter turn of phrase.'
– Scott Pack, The Friday Project
Of Scottish-Cherokee ancestry, Stona Fitch lives with his family in Concord, Massachusetts, where he leads the renegade Concord Free Press, the world’s first generosity-based publisher. His original, powerful and disturbing novels have been published in the UK, France, Germany, and the US, and have attracted an international following. His novel Senseless (published in the UK by Two Ravens Press) has been praised by J. M. Coetzee, Russell Banks, and others for anticipating violent anti-globalization protests, online hostage-taking, and other political developments; it is now an independent feature film. Printer’s Devil is also published by Two Ravens Press. Give + Take is his fourth novel.
THE EXISTENTIAL DETECTIVE by Alice Thompson
Published June 28;
9781906120511;
£9.99
To visit the book page, read an extract and purchase, please click here.
To visit Alice Thompson's author page, please click here
William Blake is a private detective. When he is asked by an eccentric scientist to investigate the whereabouts of his amnesiac missing wife, Louise, he finds himself entangled in layers of deceptions and disappearances that lead him inexorably back to unsolved mysteries in his own past: the loss of his own six-year-old daughter Emily.
The case takes Will to brothels, nightclubs and amusement arcades in the Scottish seaside resort of Portobello. Identities become confused as his sexual obsession with a nightclub singer becomes entwined with sightings of Louise, his own torturous memories, and new visions of the lost Emily.
The Existential Detective is a surreal, dreamlike story of loss, incest and what it means to remember.
Alice Thompson, the former keyboard player with post-punk eighties band, the Woodentops, was joint winner with Graham Swift of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction for her first novel, Justine. Her second novel, Pandora’s Box, was shortlisted for The Stakis Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year. Her other novels are Pharos and The Falconer (Two Ravens Press, 2008). Alice is a past winner of a Creative Scotland Award. She lives in Edinburgh.
THE ISLAND by R.J. Price
Published September 6;
9781906120542;
£9.99
To visit the book page, read an extract and pre-order, please click here.
To visit Richard's author page, click here.
This is a novel about the end of the world. Or, at least, somebody thinks it is the end of the world. And it's the story of how one man tries to deal with it, and with a very querulous little girl, and with his wife, and his past, and his future too (if there is one) on a desperate drive across London.
‘Understated yet devastating, controlled yet unpredictable – The Island is a story of rare qualities that many writers aim for and few achieve. Read it – it’ll be one of the most beautiful nightmares you’ll ever have.’ Toby Litt
'Richard Price explores the intersecting worlds of children and adults with a wild joy and sadness reminiscent of Salinger. Here Price’s lyric gifts are refined further towards the quintessence. A well-nigh perfect short novel.'
Bill Broady, author of Swimmer and Eternity is Temporary
Richard Price was born in 1966 and grew up in Renfrewshire, southwest of Glasgow. He was educated at Napier College, Edinburgh, where he studied journalism, and at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, where he studied English and Librarianship. He has a PhD on the works of twentieth-century novelist Neil M. Gunn. An acclaimed poet, his poetry collections include Lucky Day, shortlisted for the Whitbread poetry prize, and Rays, a collection of love poems. His linked short stories, A Boy in Summer, revisit the half-rural half-urban communities of his childhood. He is Head of Modern British Collections at the British Library, London.
COLLECTED VERSE by Alasdair Gray
Published October 25;
9781906120535
Hardback,
£15.99
Book and cover designed by the author
Alasdair Gray is the author of many novels, short stories, plays, poems, pamphlets and works of literary criticism. He is also an accomplished artist who has painted many murals, and is the designer and illustrator of his own books as well as those of other writers. Gray's most acclaimed work is his first novel Lanark, published in 1981 and written over a period of almost 30 years. It is now regarded as a classic, and was described by The Guardian as "one of the landmarks of 20th-century fiction." His novel Poor Things (1992) won the Whitbread Prize and the Guardian Fiction Prize. Fleck, a contemporary imitation of Goethe's Faust, is published by Two Ravens Press.
TO THE ISLANDS: An archaeologist's relentless quest to find the prehistoric hunter-gatherers of the Hebrides by Steven Mithen
Published November 1;
9781906120559
Hardback, £15.99
(Illustrated with maps and photographs)
To the Islands is a deeply personal memoir of archaeologist Steven Mithen’s 25-year quest to uncover the world of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in the Western Isles – and an elegiac defense of archaeology as a lifelong passion.
To the Islands recounts in fascinating detail the ongoing research Mithen has undertaken to reconstruct the lifestyles of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who lived in the Hebrides around 7000BC – before the rise of Neolithic farming communities. Mithen takes the reader on an epic journey which begins with the development of research plans leading to the discovery of Mesolithic sites, and follows their subsequent excavations. It comes to end with a visit to the Small Isles, where the author reflects on what he has achieved during over two decades of research in the Hebrides, and on the adventure still to come.
Mithen’s engaging, fluent and effortlessly erudite style keeps the book firmly accessible to the general reader of popular science, archaeology, history.
After taking a PhD in Archaeology at Cambridge in 1988, Steven Mithen became Professor of Early Prehistory at the University of Reading in 2000 where he is now a Pro Vice-Chancellor. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2004. He has extensively written on science for the general reader, as well as technical academic books. His most recent books, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body (2005) and After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000-5000BC (2003) have been published in over ten different languages and received extensive critical praise.
Titles forthcoming in 2011
THE LETTER by Angela Morgan Cutler
Scheduled for January 31; 9781906120528; £10.99
Following on from the success of her first book, Auschwitz, Angela Morgan Cutler offers us another work that defies easy definition or assignment to a fixed genre. The Letter creates its own category. It takes the form of a reply to the anonymous author of a threat letter that was sent to the narrator's husband, En. Instead of the natural response, to freeze or lose language in reaction to such a threat, the book releases a voice that faces the anonymous other who wrote it; a continuous, digressive reply that winds its way through daily observations, reminiscences and reflections that succeed in creating a distance from the potential violence imposed on the family.
The Letter is also an affirmation of home and of the restorative power of storytelling as the book flips between the UK – in the days and weeks that follow the arrival of the letter, with all the paranoia and imaginative leaps that fear evokes – and Spain, months later, when the threat begins to subside.
Interspersed throughout the text are accounts of other people’s stories – examples of written threats they too have received – and interviews with others caught up in the event: family, friends, a police officer, a postman, a counsellor; all sharing their own perspectives on the process of being threatened, bullied, or stalked. The Letter is a response to a threat that can never be sent: there is no return address. And yet, the narrator's reply to the unknown author of the threat remains as a powerful trace of the experience, and a testament to so many stories left untold.
Angela lives in Cardiff with her two teenage sons and husband Ian. She worked for 10 years as a psychiatric nurse, trained as a fine artist and completed a Ph.D. in Critical & Creative Writing at Cardiff University. She has been running creative writing groups since 2000. Auschwitz was her first novel.
THE BEE DANCER by Sharon Blackie
Scheduled for October;
9781906120610;
£9.99
Psyche is a solitary child. Isolated – both by her exceptional beauty and her lack of interest in academic pursuits – from the hothouse of Oxford intellectualism that her family inhabits, she escapes into daydreams of love. Lost in a fantasy world peopled with fairytale princes, Rochesters and Heathcliffs, she is pitifully ill-equipped for the real thing. And her stepsister Ann stole the only boy Psyche ever really loved. So, when Psyche returns to Oxford after a failed marriage and a suicide attempt, and meets Ann’s charismatic American husband Sam, the scene is set for tragedy.
Years later, during a long hot summer on the west coast of Scotland, the close relationship of Psyche’s teenage daughter and stepdaughter is fractured by their fight over Jonnie Mackenzie. Psyche – haunted still by guilt – fears that history will repeat itself. And so she creates for her daughter Joy an imaginary movie of the story of her life. Fragmented yet atmospheric, the movie contains all the secrets that Psyche has kept over the years – including the secret of who Joy’s father really is…
Populated with a range of fascinating and semi-mythical characters – Diana, who dances with bees; Tom, the blind beekeeper next door; Aphra, the therapist; the mysterious Eleutherios (a nickname for Eros, the god of love) who has been sending Psyche emails for years – The Bee Dancer is a novel about one woman’s quest for love and identity. It is also a novel about fictions – and especially, the fictions we tell ourselves about love.
Sharon Blackie’s roots are in the north-east of England and in Edinburgh, though she has travelled all over the world and lived in France, Ireland and America. She is now firmly attached to a working lochside croft in the north-west Highlands of Scotland, where she lives with her husband, David Knowles. Originally trained as a neuroscientist, Sharon established Two Ravens Press in 2006. Once upon a time in the American south-west she learned to fly to overcome a fear of flying, an experience that led to her first critically acclaimed novel, The Long Delirious Burning Blue. Sharon received a Writer's Bursary from the Scottish Arts Council to work on The Bee Dancer.
Our 2010 list is supported by the Scottish Arts Council.
