Scotland

Authors from Scotland, gathered here, are not one school and not one city. The country runs from island and Highland settings to the housing schemes and tenements of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and the writing follows the same spread. You will find crime that treats a real city as its subject, historical fiction built on sea crossings and migration, and family novels where the past keeps interrupting the present. Scottish writers here work in English and in Scots-inflected voices, and several of them write about people who have left and cannot quite settle anywhere else.

Crime sits at the centre of this group, and it is crime of a particular kind. Ian Rankin built a career on Edinburgh as a working city rather than a postcard, and the detective novels that follow from that put ordinary streets under pressure until they give something up. Graeme Macrae Burnet works the same territory from a different angle, using documents, testimony and unreliable voices to make the reader do the sorting. Helen FitzGerald goes darker and faster, with people whose ordinary lives have already started to come apart. Around them the range widens: Alan Warner writes coastal towns and the young people stuck in them, Margaret Elphinstone takes historical settings and the long sea routes that connect them, and Maggie O'Farrell moves between family memory and the moment a life changes. What holds the group together is place as a force rather than a backdrop, and a habit of writing people who are not protected by anything.