After a chance encounter she befriends the Gillespie family and soon becomes a fixture in all of their lives. But when tragedy strikes - leading to a notorious criminal trial - the promise and certainties of this world all too rapidly disorientate into mystery and deception.Featuring a memorable cast of characters, infused with atmosphere and period detail, and shot through with wicked humour, Gillespie and I is a tour de force from one of the emerging names of British fiction.

    Four boys becoming men: Juice Terry, the work-shy fanny-merchant, with corkscrew curls and sticky fingers; Billy the boxer: driven, controlled, playing to his strengths; Carl, the Milky Bar Kid, drifting along to his own soundtrack; and the doomed Gally - who has one less skin than everyone else and seems to find catastrophe at every corner. As we follow their lives from the seventies into the new century - from punk to techno, from speed to Es - we can see each of them trying to struggle out from under the weight of the conditioning of class and culture, peer pressure and their parents' hopes that maybe their sons will do better than they did. What binds the four of them is the friendship formed by the scheme, their school, and their ambition to escape from both; their loyalty fused in street morality: back up your mates, don't hit women and, most importantly, never grass - on anyone. Despite its scale and ambition, Glue has all Irvine Welsh's usual pace and vigour, crackling dialogue, scabrous set-pieces and black, black humour, but it is also a grown-up book about growing up - about the way we live our lives, and what happens to us when things become unstuck.

    Scotland is in the grip of the worst winter in living memory. Some say the Day of Judgement has arrived. The King of Scotland rides out from Edinburgh into the stormy night. On the road he is murdered by one of his own men, leaving the succession to the throne wide open. Civil war threatens as the powerful Scottish families jostle for power, not knowing that King Edward I of England has set his own plans for conquest in motion. But all is not destined to go Edward's way. Through the ashes of war, through blood feuds and divided loyalties, a young squire will rise to defy England's greatest king. His name is Robert Bruce. Insurrection is the first in an addictive and action-packed trilogy in the tradition of Conn Iggulden, Bernard Cornwell and Manda Scott.

    Containing poems chosen from her first four acclaimed volumes, this collection also includes six poems from the later 'The World's Wife'.

    Includes The Honorable Imposter, The Captive Bride, The Indentured Heart, The Gentle Rebel, and The Saintly Buccaneer.

    It captures the history that matters today, stories of freedom fighters, suffragettes, the workers of Red Clydeside, and the hardship and protest of the treacherous Thatcher era.With riveting storytelling, Chris Bambery recounts the struggles for nationhood. He charts the lives of Scots who changed the world, as well as those who fought for the cause of ordinary people at home, from the poets Robbie Burns and Hugh MacDiarmid to campaigners such as John Maclean and Helen Crawfurd.This is a passionate cry for more than just independence but also for a nation based on social justice.

    Life among the warring factions in Scotland was dangerous for the infant Queen, however, and at age five Mary was sent to France to be raised alongside her betrothed, the Dauphin Francois. Surrounded by all the sensual comforts of the French court, Mary's youth was peaceful, charmed, and when she became Queen of France at the age of sixteen, she seemed to have all she could wish for. But by her eighteenth birthday, Mary was a widow who had lost one throne and had been named by the Pope for another. And her extraordinary adventure had only begun. Defying her powerful cousin Elizabeth I, Mary set sail in 1561 to take her place as the Catholic Queen of a newly Protestant Scotland. A virtual stranger in her volatile native land, Mary would be hailed as a saint, denounced as a whore, and ultimately accused of murdering her second husband, Lord Darnley, in order to marry her lover, the Earl of Bothwell. She was but twenty-five years old when she fled Scotland for the imagined sanctuary of Elizabeth's England, where she would be embroiled in intrigue until she was beheaded "like a criminal" in 1587. In her stunning first novel, The Autobiography of Henry VIII, Margaret George established herself as one of the finest historical novelists of our time. Now she brings us a new, mesmerizing blend of history and storytelling as she turns the astonishing facts of the life of Mary Queen of Scots into magnificent fiction that sweeps us from the glittering French court where Mary spent her youth, to the bloodstained Scotland where she reigned as Queen, to the cold English castles where she ended her days. Never before have we been offered such arich and moving portrayal of the Scots Queen, whose beauty inspired poetry, whose spirit brought forth both devotion and hatred, and whose birthright generated glorious dreams, hideous treachery, and murdered men at her feet.

    Here, the Whitbread Award-winning author of Brother of the More Famous Jack weaves a funny, sexy, and poignant story that begins with the death of a young woman and blossoms into an Austen-esque comedy of manners that explores the connections between friends, lovers, and families. With a switchback plot that shifts from Scotland to Rome, from London to the Cotswolds, Barbara Trapido's fifth novel is elegant, surprising, and peopled with wholly original characters whose extraordinary fates are at once uniquely hilarious and immensely touching.

    Kennedy examines the nature of the individual, both in isolation and society, as characters define and deny their chosen identities. While showing us the unlikeliness of intimacy and the impossibility of communication, Kennedy also reveals the subversive liberation of impotence, the humour of discomfort as human beings chafe together, the crazed claustrophobia of the family adn the wildly funny results of an eccentricity unleashed.

    Kept cloistered from a world that is full of dangers for someone with royal blood. Half the country wish to see her on the throne and many others for her death, which would leave the way clear for her cousin James, the Scottish KingArbella longs to be free from her cold-hearted grandmother; to love who she wants, to wear a man's trousers and ride her beloved horse, Dorcas. But if she ever wishes to break free she must learn to navigate the treacherous game of power, or end up dead.

    He's fallen for Helen of Annandale and, in turn, fallen foul of his rival, Robert Bell: a man as violent as he is influential. In an ungovernable land where minor lairds vie to rule and blood feuds are settled by the sword, Fleming faces a battle to win Helen, and to stay alive.Entrusted as guard to the lovers' secret trysts, Langton is thrust into the middle of a dangerous triangle - and soon discovers Helen is not so chaste as she is fair. But Langton has his own secrets to keep - and other masters to serve. Someone has noticed his connections, and recruited him in their bid to control the hierarchy of the Border families; someone who would use lovers as pawns in the serious game of power and dynastic supremacy.Striking like a sword into the extraordinary history of the Borderlands, Greig's vital prose renders the Border Ballad Fair Helen of Kirkconnel Lea as a breathless romance, a stirring adventure, and a memento mori. Gutsy, atmospheric and wry as ever, he shines a candle-light on the dark days of a lawless land, and the real woman behind the legend often called the Scottish Romeo & Juliet. Here it is brilliantly re-presented as the source of an equally famed, more complex drama.

    Where do she and her guests spend Christmas and how do they get there? The answers to these and many other questions are given in this intriguing and riveting account of what really goes on at a Royal Christmas, written by one of Britain’s leading Royal writers, and based on facts from impeccable sources at Buckingham Palace.Brian Hoey is acknowledged to be one of the most important Royal authors in the world, having written 28 books about the Royal Family. He conducted the first ever television interview with the Queen’s only daughter, Prince Anne, the Princess Royal, and also wrote her only official biography. He was a commentator at the wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana in 1981, and again, at the funeral of Diana in 1997, and his written work has appeared in countries throughout the world, particularly the United States, Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Hoey has been a guest on many major radio and television shows in Britain and America, including the Today Show, Good Morning America and in Britain, This Morning.

    Places" Jonathan Meades has an obsessive preoccupation with places. He has spent thirty years constructing sixty films, two novels and hundreds of pieces of journalism that explore an extraordinary range of them, from natural landscapes to man-made buildings and 'the gaps between them', drawing attention to what he calls 'the rich oddness of what we take for granted'. This book collects 54 pieces and six film scripts that dissolve the barriers between high and low culture, good and bad taste, deep seriousness and black comedy. Meades delivers 'heavy entertainment' - strong opinions backed up by an astonishing depth of knowledge. To read Meades on places, buildings, politics, or cultural history is an exhilarating workout for the mind. He leaves you better informed, more alert, less gullible. "Everything is fantastical if you stare at it for long enough. Everything is interesting."

    Abandoned at birth and shuttled among foster homes, Nikki Black decides at twenty-eight to seek out her birth mother, intent on killing her. Nikki’s vengeance takes her to a remote island off the coast of Scotland, where both the beaches and the inhabitants are full of artifacts from the past that haunt the present. Here she discovers a witchlike mother who concocts remedies in her dank kitchen and a stuttering, monstrous brother whose seemingly simple mind is filled with stories of past islanders, crofters, and Vikings. Gradually her brother’s dangerous love and strange way of seeing the world transform Nikki’s life in ways that she — and the reader — could never expect. With her signature blend of psychological intensity and strong moral underpinnings, Jane Rogers skillfully leads us into a primal, almost mythic world where our darkest impulses and most profound fears are played out to shocking consequence. Part fairy tale, part murder mystery, ISLAND is, like the madness it depicts, terrifying, logical, and utterly consuming.

    Along flat fens and up Swiss Alps, they will meet new friends and exorcise old demons as they push their bodies - and their relationship - to the limit.