Polygon Books

During her career Liz Lochhead has been described variously as a poet, feminist playwright, translator and broadcaster but has said that 'when somebody asks me what I do I usually say writer. The most precious thing to me is to be a poet. If I were a playwright, I'd like to be a poet in the theatre.' Liz Lochhead has a large and devoted audience and delights audiences where she goes.

A grisly murder. A vanishing corpse. A secret romance. A ghostly tale. An innocent accused.
1588.
It is a dark and turbulent time. Scotland's queen has been executed, the Spanish king seeks revenge, and the people of St Andrews cling desperately to the rhythm of the old ways.
The ancient burgh is renowned throughout Europe as a seat of Church and learning but it is also a town full of suspicion, conspiracy and murder. Shirley McKay sets her intriguing and sometimes comic tale around the key points in the calendar: the four quarter days of Candlemas, Whitsun, Lammas, Martinmas and the feast day of Yule.
When the first victim is discovered on Candlemas Eve, Hew Cullan, scholar and lawyer, is called upon to investigate; the dark side of the sixteenth century comes alive in a rich tapestry infused with the textures of history and folklore, woven by a master crime writer.

The world, in Iain Crichton Smith's vision is a field full of folk; and one Scottish village is its microcosm. Here, the Minister wrestles with his loss of faith, and his cancer, concealing them even from his wife, but she had divined them. Mrs Berry cultivates her garden assiduously, and when Jehovah's Witnesses come quoting their texts, she tells them that the hill at the end of the village can be climbed by many paths. Old Annie has no doubts about her path: she has no use for Christianity ('Protestants and Catholics, nothing but guns and fighting') and finds her answer in the East. On more mundane levels, Morag Bheag worries about her son serving in Northern Ireland, and Chrissie Murray shocks the village by leaving her husband and making for Glasgow — taking only a radio with her, that's what shocks most. Murdo Macfarlane vehemently urges his puritanical views — about, for instance, the use of the church hall for a young people's dance — and David Collins nurses his hatred of Germans, but cannot insult them when they come as tourists.
In short, it's a village much like any other, with its prejudices and certainties and kindliness and heartbreak: the whole and the small part. As the Minister sees in his visionary moment at the annual sports, when the petty disputes over the wheel-barrow race and the tragic news of young Bheag's death come together in his realisation that it's all a part of 'this supremely imperfect and perfect earth.'
Crichton Smith's novels never carry any superfluous weight: they're as spare as sprinters. He writes with a poet's concentration, and never more precisely, or more movingly, than here, in what amounts to a gentle, compassionate meditation on life and death, with a warm, affirmative conclusion.

In 2016 Scottish writer Iain Maloney and his Japanese wife Minori moved to a village in rural Japan. This is the story of his attempt to fit in, be accepted and fulfil his duties as a member of the community, despite being the only foreigner in the village.
Even after more than a decade living in Japan and learning the language, life in the countryside was a culture shock. Due to increasing numbers of young people moving to the cities in search of work, there are fewer rural residents under the retirement age — and they have two things in abundance: time and curiosity. Iain's attempts at amateur farming, basic gardening and DIY are conducted under the watchful eye of his neighbours and wife. But curtain twitching is the least of his problems. The threat of potential missile strikes and earthquakes is nothing compared to the venomous snakes, terrifying centipedes and bees the size of small birds that stalk Iain's garden.
Told with self-deprecating humour, this memoir gives a fascinating insight into a side of Japan rarely seen and affirms the positive benefits of immigration for the individual and the community. It's not always easy being the only gaijin in the village.

In 1920s Scotland a foreign dignitary on a secret visit has been abducted by men who plan to murder him.
Veteran adventurer Richard Hannay must recruit three of his oldest friends to prevent a catastrophe that could plunge Europe into another war. It is a mission none of them ever expected to undertake, for the man they must rescue was once their sworn enemy — the Kaiser.
As he and his allies pursue a desperate chase through the Highlands, Hannay discovers that he has stumbled upon an international conspiracy, one that shockingly involves a member of the British royal family.
In Castle Macnab Robert J. Harris, bestselling author of The Thirty-One Kings, has created a new adventure for Richard Hannay and a sequel to John Buchan's classic novel John Macnab.

When the body of a retired sheriff is discovered in his grand house in the New Town of Edinburgh, Detective Sergeant Alice Rice finds herself hunting his killer.
The search leads her to an unfamiliar world where wind-farm developers xe2x80x93 with millions of pounds at stake xe2x80x93 and protesters face each other with daggers drawn. Just as Alice thinks an answer is beginning to emerge, the sheriffxe2x80x99s lover is killed in an apparent hit-and-run accident.
An unlikely coincidence or, as the search widens, is Alice now investigating a double murder?

“A strong collection showing a highly skilled poet on top of her craft, using language and imagery in a sensitive but candid way.” —Brian McCabe Vividly evoking the landscape of Scotland, particularly the brooding presences of the Scottish islands and Sutherland, these poems also touch on personal love and loss—combining nature with human themes in a collection that is both intimate and celebratory. Presented in English and Gaelic, the poems build on Meg Bateman’s established flair for uniting intense emotion and feeling with a classic, restrained control and structure that harkens back to Gaelic song-poetry and the beauty in a poem’s inevitability.“The poems have the strength and simplicity of art made for a community rather than an elite, though they are far from artless.” —The Guardian“The end result of this beautifully constructed and paced collection is a universal evocation of commonalities fused by human consideration . . . The title Transparencies hints at ephemeral moments caught. The poet suggests she aspires to a ‘palimpsest’ of emotions recalled and now renewed upon the page. She succeeds.” —The Herald “Meg Bateman’s embrace of Gaelic has awakened her poetry to a noble passionate candor rare in today’s over-ironical English.” —Les Murray

'Confidently-written, warm and accessible… a fun and pacey book' — The Herald 'This is a laugh-out-loud, feel-good story which demands a follow-up *****' — News of the World It's 1975 and Britain is a country in political flux. In Glasgow the dirty old Victorian slums have been razed to the ground, replaced with brand new slums twenty storeys high. Chips are a health food and the very mention of filet mignon would spark a riot on the Govan Road. As its citizens struggle to adapt to their changing world, they wonder what will replace the steel mills and the shipyards, whether they look stupid in flares and what the lyrics of the Bay City Rollers' 'Shang-A-Lang' actually mean? Ten-year-old Steve Duff longs to be poor and neglected like his friend Wally, whose parents are incapable drunks. Frustratingly for Steve, he's saddled with a conventional, stable and middle-class family. Then, over the course of a year, his father has a fling with a barmaid and leaves home, his mother's response is to start a psychology degree, his sister is arrested for demanding money with menaces and his brother gets a girl pregnant.As if the normal indignities of growing up weren't bad enough…This is a funny touching and heart-warming debut novel that will strike a chord with anyone who has been an awkward kid at least once in their life.

A collection of poetry from “the patron saint of literary street urchins” (The New York Times).The Dead Queen of Bohemia is a journey through a life lived on the edge. With a poetic style influenced by Gertrude Stein and William Burroughs, this collection is woven with surrealistic imagery that is both unflinching and dislocating. Jenni Fagan’s poetry is raw and tough yet beautiful and tender, and with themes of loss and recovery, hope and defiance, represents a clarion call from a self-taught poet who started writing at the age of seven and so far has not stopped. “Full of desire and guitars and witches” (Sunday Herald), The Dead Queen of Bohemia documents the progression of a voice and a life written over the last twenty years, opening with Fagan’s most recent work and including her previous two collections.

For an eleven-year-old boy, living with his widowed mother and younger brother in a remote seaside village on one of the Western Isles of Scotland, growing up has its difficulties, as well as its idyllic pleasures. Iain Crichton Smith's vivid evocation is loosely based on memories of his own childhood on Lewis. There are so many discoveries to be made, along the shore and on the moor. Crossing a field under snow has its perils; exploring an empty cottage has its imaginative terrors; you might be humiliated by a village woman when your mother has sent you to a neighbour to borrow half-a-crown until her pension comes through: or playing along the shore with Pauline, a visitor from London with her wider knowledge of the world, you might find your own certainties called into question. There is poverty and richness; and eventually the war casts its shadows across your world. Iain Crichton Smith has brought to life a gallery of distinctly memorable figures: the sure-footed Blinder with his amazing sense of the island terrain; Stork with his wooden leg; Speedy, the reluctant footballer; Jim returned after twenty years in America with such stories… The author's own sense of the terrain, and of the characters who inhabit it, is equally sure and beautifully precise; his book will evoke for all ages the inner-emotions of growing up, as well as the outward sights and scents of an island experience.

Tom and Vera Mallow, who are in only their early thirties, might indeed be said to be in the autumn of their lives already, they are school teachers, both of them, but without any strong feeling for children, and without nay children of their own. Their outlook is wary; they hold themselves apart. When they invite Tom's mother to share their home, they do so from a sense of duty rather than love. But after autumn, we find, comes summer; and it is the mothers — Tom's and, later Vera's — who in surprising ways reverse the march of the seasons: Mrs Mallow as irritant, with her incongruous friendship with Mrs Murphy, a Catholic and of a lower social class; and then Angela, the vivacious ex-actress, from the a different world, to provide catharsis. Here is a sympathetic and unusual study of a marriage that, surprisingly and against the odds, takes the right turning; though lest anyone should feel that Crichton Smith is succumbing to sentiment, the novel's last page echoes the veiled foreboding of it first. Once again he reminds us, with oblique irony, of the poet lurking behind the novelist,

The titular Mr Dixon is not the novel's main character but the creation of the novel's main character, Tom Spence. Spence describes himself as “an embryo novelist”; he has had the odd job — for example, delivering mail — but is largely without skills and has bet all on his career as a writer. Unfortunately he has “never brought a novel to a successful conclusion” never mind had one published, and, unable to live the dream, has instead dreamed it through his protagonist, Drew Dixon. His novel has ground to a halt because he has decided Dixon will “meet a girl of twenty-five or thereabouts whose entry into his world was to change his life” but has no idea how to write it. Fortuitously he meets a young woman, Ann, and, as their relationship develops we begin to sense that it will be Spence's life that is changed rather than Dixon's. As Spence's isolation ends he revisits his past, attempting to contact the mother he hasn't seen in years and returning to his old school to see the English teacher who he believes encouraged him to write. Increasingly his admiration for Dixon turns to hatred and Spence is forced to choose between life and art.

While the army of the Goths makes war, the Romans may live in peace!' AD 468. With the last Roman emperor of the West deposed, the Empire is in ruins — a plaything for the barbarian armies that rampage across it. This extraordinary story spans Europe, from the intrigues of Constantinople to the battlefields of the future France, North Africa and the Balkans, tracing the rise of Theoderic the Goth to a pinnacle of power and wealth. Ross Laidlaw was born in Aberdeen and educated at Cambridge University. He has worked and travelled extensively in Southern Africa and currently lives in East Lothian.

A classic which should be on every bookshelf,' — Scotland on Sunday Glasgow, 'the dear green place', is the setting for Archie Hind's acclaimed novel. Mat Craig is a young Glaswegian working-class hero and would-be novelist, whose desire to define himself as an artist creates social and family tensions. Set in 1960s Glasgow, The Dear Green Place is an absorbing and moving story, the whole book is invested with strong and sombre descriptions of the city around Mat.

Abdul Wahab, an Afghan science teacher, is eagerly anticipating the arrival of his British fiancee, Laura Johnstone, in the capital of his home country. Having met while Abdul was a student at Manchester University, the couple are eager to settle down in Isban. However, Abdul is not the only one interested in Miss Johnstone's arrival. Prince Naim, one of the sons of the king, sees the marriage as a symbol of a successful union between East and West, and in his hurry to cement this union, promotes Abdul into a position of power he is far from ready for. Meanwhile, the employees at The British Embassy are in turmoil at this new arrival and all the disaster they are sure this mixed marriage will bring.

Andrew Greig recounts in poetic sequence the tale of his open dinghy voyage from Stromness in Scapa Flow and an overnight stay on Cava (an island formerly inhabited for over twenty years by two unusual women) in poetic sequence. In sailing small boats in scary open waters Andrew Greg found a new activity and a new metaphor for life. Written in six weeks, Found at Sea is a 'very wee epic' about sailing, male friendship and a voyage. Bon voyage!

“The wit and swagger” of this collection by the celebrated Scottish poet “belie a skill as a technician that she shares with the greats” (Scotsman, UK).This poetry collection by Liz Lochhead features never before published work along with poems written during her time as Scots Makar—Scotland’s national poet. They from commissioned works, such as ‘Connecting Cultures’, written for the Commonwealth Games in 2014 to more personal works, such as ‘Favourite Place’, about holidays in the west coast with her late husband.Throughout her career, Lochhead has been described variously as a poet, feminist-playwright, translator and broadcaster but has said that ‘when somebody asks me what I do I usually say writer. The most precious thing to me is to be a poet. If I were a playwright, I’d like to be a poet in the theatre.’

A delight to find something new … funny, moving, horrifying and compelling' — Times Literary Supplement 'FitzGerald … is adept at arresting openings, tense cliffhangers and tumultuous climaxes' — The Herald 'Bloody Women is delicious, ingenious, inventive and mordantly funny. Helen FitzGerald has a real skill for making the totally absurd and goofy, thoroughly logical and reasonable' — Big Beat from Badsville Returning to Scotland to organise her wedding, Catriona is overcome with the jitters. She decides to tie up loose ends before settling permanently in Tuscany, and seeks out her ex-boyfriends. Only problem is, they all end up dead and Catriona is the prime suspect.

During a trip to China, Paul and Christine experience the nightmare of every parent: their four year old son is threatened with kidnap. The only safe place for the family is the US embassy in Beijing, but they are two thousand miles away, with the police searching frantically for them, and all airports, train stations and major roads under surveillance. They’ll have no chance without help from strangers, but who will be willing to risk their lives for them?Suspenseful and rife with the page-turning storytelling that has come to define Sendker’s work, Far Side of the Night  is a brilliant and timely thriller that offers a penetrating look into contemporary China.

Ben Martin is charming and successful: an academic who has raised money for children’s charities and worked with women’s agencies in sub-Saharan Africa, a devoted husband. But when his brother Francois, an artist based in Lisbon, finds out about Ben’s affair with a student, Rita Kalungal, he finds himself feeling responsible both for his brother’s actions as well as Rita; and Rita begins to realise that her involvement with Ben has far-reaching consequences on herself and her family, and others.