A hooded figure who holes up in a concrete pillbox on the beach has been seen lurking near the school. Our man takes it upon himself to confront the pervert but his interest in the Bunker Man gradually tilts from apprehension into vigilantism, then obsessed depravity...

    With this brilliantly inventive collection, Ali Smith joins the campaign to save our public libraries and celebrate their true place in our culture and history.

    These are people for whom the idea of ‘home' has become increasingly intangible, hard to believe – and happiness, or grace, or freedom, all now seem to belong in some kind of dream, or a fable they might have read in a children's picture book. As he says in one story, ‘All a man has is his work and his sense of himself, all the secret life he holds inside that nobody else can know.' But in each of these normal, damaged lives, we are shown something extraordinary: a dogged belief in some kind of hope or beauty that flies in the face of all reason and is, as a result, both transfiguring and heart-rending. John Burnside is unique in contemporary British letters: he is one of our best living poets, but he is also a thrillingly talented writer of fiction. These exquisitely written pieces, each weighted so perfectly, opens up the whole wound of a life in one moment – and each of these twelve short stories carries the freight and density of a great novel.

    First US publication for the Scottish Spence.Neil McGraw is a lad in Glasgow, an only child, the son of a dour undertaker permanently embittered by his wife's death during childbirth. Whenever the boy misbehaves, he's locked in the basement among the coffins, so it's not surprising he asks every body: What happens when you die? Against his will, he finds himself learning the trade. This is less gloomy than it sounds. The story moves at a good clip as the resilient Neil experiments with drinking and dating.The crisis comes when his dad finds him and his girl making out in a coffin. Soon, it's Neil's turn to lock his old man, dead drunk, into the basement, before hightailing it to the London of the Swinging '60s. A friendly queer, Abe Morris, offers him a crash pad, no strings attached, where Neil finds drugs, straight sex, and Zen. The party ends when Abe, stoned, is killed in traffic and Spence abandons conventional narrative to send Neil hopscotching around the world before depositing him, 15 years later, beside the funeral pyres of the Ganges. Here, he gets very sick but is rescued by a vision in a sari: Lila, a Londoner, back home for her father's funeral. The two fall in love and marry, lickety-split, before Neil is summoned back to Glasgow. His father has died, leaving him the business, which Neil gives a hippie twist, producing brightly painted coffins in unusual shapes, with Lila a business partner.The mood is light and buoyant, but novelistic concerns (what makes Lila tick? why do the couple decide not to have kids?) are shelved in favor of a scrapbook of original last rites, seasoned with Eastern mysticism. There's an appealing freshness to Spence's writing; too bad he gives up on credible plotting and characterization.

    From more than 100 interviews and confessions, Ewan Morrison re-tells the true-life tales of those who work, shop, and even find love inside their walls. With wry wit, insight, and compassion, he reveals how malls manipulate our emotions, how they are an ideal space to meet a new lover or to kill yourself, and how they are taking over the world. As shopping malls spread round the globe at the amazing speed of one new mall every 72 hours, and everyone, in every country ends up wearing the same fashions, Tales from the Mall gives us a page-turning tour of the history of the mall and a vision of our coming future. Packed full of terribly tweetable facts and gut wrenching, sometimes hilarious stories; this book will change the way you think about your hair color, your loyalty cards, the global economy, and your boyfriend or girlfriend—forever.

    In this collection he explores the dark depths of the human condition, offering tales of death, disaster and - just occasionally - redemption.

    She didn't just leave the small Scottish town where she grew up; she fled from it as fast as she could. Now she's become expert at metropolitan living; she could walk by a million faces and not notice any of them. And her dream is almost within her grasp.When Rowan does start packing her bags, she has to find room for one very unexpected item. And she's headed not for exotic distant shores but back to Scotland. There, she feels at first like nothing more than a source of good gossip. But as she discovers that no one is quite who she thought they were, Rowan begins to see that home could be where she'll find what she was looking for after all...

    The nephew's frantic, stalled progress and other bizarre diversions form this wickedly hilarious novel.But who is The Man Who Walks? Is he simply a water-carrying madman with one glass eye and a fondness for whisky and pony nuts, and who has a physiological inability to handle slopes? Or is he a savant, touched by the hand of God, wandering the back roads along ancient, ancestral tracks? And as the sinister, unstable nephew gains on The Man Who Walks, can it be that it will all end in a field and that this field is Culloden Moor?

    Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, called it "a rich Scotch broth of language, steaming with metaphor...and pungent dialect." Winner of Britain's Whitbread Book of the Year Award.

    A quick-witted and vastly entertaining novel that takes Douglas Skelton into the crime fiction big league.” Alex Gray“If you like your humour black and your detective novels hard boiled, The Dead Don’t Boogie is a cut above the rest.” Theresa Talbot“A white-knuckle, wisecracking thriller.” Caro Ramsay A missing teenage girl should be an easy job for Dominic Queste – after all, finding lost souls is what he does best. But sometimes it’s better if those souls stay lost. Jenny Deavers is trouble, especially for an ex-cokehead like Queste. Some truly nasty characters are very keen indeed to get to Jenny, and will stop at nothing... including murder. 
As the bodies pile up, Queste has to use all his street smarts both to protect Jenny and to find out just who wants her dead. The trail leads him to a vicious world of brutal gangsters, merciless hitmen, dark family secrets and an insatiable lust for power in the highest echelons of politics.

    Also included are Paul Reekie's fictional account of ideals betrayed, and Irvine Welsh's first ever sci-fi story, featuring alien space casuals wreaking havoc through the known universe. The resulting mix is intoxicating to say the least.

    She finds London a very lonely place, until a charming young artist literally drops in on her rooftop garden... Across two quietly powerful novels, Bel's story unfolds as she moves from London to a fishing hotel in the rugged Scottish highlands and then finally to a picturesque cottage in the Cotswolds in need of repair, all while attempting to navigate unexpected friendships and romances. Filled with all the warmth and charm which D. E. Stevenson readers have come to anticipate, The Bel Lamington Novels are beautifully written gentle romances, sure to satisfy steadfast Stevenson fans and newcomers alike.

    the integrity of vision coruscating; the whole driven by the author's restless experimentation with form. And at least two stories, "Blood" itself and "Fearless", will certainly end up in anthologies: not Best Scottish Writers, or Best Women Writers, but quite simply, Best." - New Statesman and Society"I remember reading a story by Janice Galloway for the first time; its urgency of voice, that certainty of expression, I wondered why I hadn't heard of her before; then discovered that she was altogether new to writing. It was some debut. She really is a fine writer." - James Kelman"A salutary collection... a marvelous revelation. A writer of passion and virtuosity shines through." - Scotland on Sunday"Genuinely unnerving... she is a fierce, troubling new writer." - Observer"Galloway flecks her hard-edged realism with impressionist grace-notes, a potent mixture that confirms her... as one of Scotland's best young writers." - Sunday Telegraph"There is ample proof in Blood of Galloway's unassailable talent. Marvellously funny and beautifully paced." - Glasgow Herald

    The first few chapters are available as 'The Chronicles of Engella Rhys (Preview).' Would you sacrifice your future to save your past? Engella Rhys is alone, adrift and on the run. Pursued by a secret agency, known only as the Hunters, she must stay ahead to stay alive. As she travels through space-time using dangerously experimental technology, she only has one wish: to be reunited with her lost parents. After a close shave with a Hunter on the streets of New Shanghai, Engella escapes to find herself on a deserted beach. When she meets a kind stranger, who offers her food and shelter, Engella feels safe and protected for the first time in years. But who is this woman? And why did their paths cross at the most convenient of times? Engella soon discovers their lives are intertwined in more ways than she could ever imagine.

    A lonely teenage girl falls in love with an older, married neighbor. A woman attends a party at the home of her boyfriend’s ex-wife. A schoolteacher gets fired for teaching time incorrectly to grade-school students. And a young woman recovering from a breakup receives guidance from a drunk therapist. Poignant and sharply rendered, Otis’s stories seek answers to the questions of whom we love and why, how we search for love, lose it, or find it—sometimes at the last moment and in the most unlikely places. Quirky and hilarious, these stories display a knowing affection for human strangeness.