Open Up

This month we celebrate reaching out and embracing the new: new stories, authors, ideas and connections. We offer a brilliant array of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and children's books that invite you in to their worlds for enlightenment, entertainment and adventure. It's time for you to unwrap these goodies!

Nothing Left To Fear From Hell

David Robinson Reviews

David Robinson finds Alan Warner’s novella a brilliant addition to the Darklands series.

Nothing Left to Fear From Hell By Alan Warner Published by Polygon

If you have read any of Alan Warner’s novels, you’ll already know that he doesn’t do predictable, whether in plot, style or character. Take Uncle, the one-eyed hoarder of pilchards and builder of domestic papier-mâché tunnels in The Man Who Walks. Who else would invent such a man – or, come to that, his crazed journey, pursued by his drifter nephew, to Culloden?

So what would you, dear reader, expect from a Warner novel which, chronologically at least, starts at the site of Scotland’s last battle? One which features not less a personage than Charles Edward Stuart, and whose title Nothing Left to Fear From Hell is emblazoned over a picture of a crowned skull on a blood-red cover?

Well, I’ll tell you what I thought I was in for. I didn’t think it would be anything as straightforward as the old, old story about the prince on the run from the redcoats, helped into his disguise as an Irish maid by Flora MacDonald and rowed over the sea to Skye. Not with that author, title and cover. Instead, Nothing Left to Fear from Hell would surely be about the not-so-bonnie prince of Roderick Graham’s 2014 biography, the boozy (six bottles of wine a day before he even moved onto the brandy) bloated, mistress-beating boor he became in later years. The Hell – the word dwarfs all others on the embossed title – would be the inescapable hell of regret: all those lives the Young Pretender wasted, all that loyalty and promise he betrayed, all those hopes twisted into tragedy. Nothing left to fear from hell because Charles Edward Stuart, the crowned skull on that goth-gladdening cover, is already in it.

And yet when Warner’s book opens, we are not...

The Grief Nurse: A Q & A with Angie Spoto

The Grief Nurse is a fantasy gothic thriller, and debut novel, by Angie Spoto. BooksfromScotland caught up with her to find out more about the book.

The Grief Nurse By Angie Spoto Published by Sandstone Press

Can you tell us about The Grief Nurse?

The Grief Nurse is set in a world where the wealthy elite don’t have to feel grief. Grief nurses, people who can sense and take grief, are indentured to only the wealthiest, most influential families. The story follows Lynx, who is a grief nurse for the Aster family. The story begins when the eldest Aster son dies and the Asters host a death party on their isolated island estate. Shortly after guests flock to the island and the party begins, the first mysterious death occurs, and the bodies quickly start to pile up. Lynx becomes entangled in solving the mystery of what is causing the deaths. T...

The Book … According to Claire Alexander

‘I need to be obsessed with my characters, to let them take over my imagination until the thoughts translate into words on the page.’

The Maiden: A Q & A with Kate Foster

‘I didn’t just find her life interesting; I found her notoriety fascinating.’

Electricity

‘Milk became cream and cream became butter and corn became bread and peat became fire and flames and boys and girls became men and women.’

Lipstick and Leather: Kim Hawes’ Playlist

‘The lyrics of this one really captured how I felt on my first few jobs: “I quit my nine to five, we’re lost in music.”‘

Scotty Plants a Seed

The forests come back if we all plant a seed, The shade and the homes and the air that we need.

Sea Bean: Patrick Jamieson Reviews

‘I do hope Sally’s message is found and read by many – I’ve no doubt they’ll be better off for it.’

Writing Landscape

‘Tidal pools captured a marine microcosm of fixed creatures or slow-movers, encrustations, vivid colours, the dance of light and water, things that waft: a lavish chest spilling treasure that had noth …

Hair/Power

‘Hair can be such a bond in a community that a person acting out on their own, in order to say something, can spark a feeling, and reaction, in the community that they are bound to.’

Femke

‘Only then did I realise how much of myself I had poured into this character and his Achterberg-inspired poetry – how much of myself I had poured into this book.’

Museum Mystery Squad and the Case from Outer Space

‘Someone’s sent the museum a blackmail letter threatening to steal a prized exhibit from the brand-new Space Zone. Can the Squad make one giant leap in their investigation, and stop the gravity-defyin …

In Search of the Blue Flower

‘They were rather like the fossils I had found, images somehow conveying the spirit of the object they recorded.’

Euro Spies

‘My big hope for this book is that Euro Spies will inspire young readers to discover more about all the wonderful things Europe has to offer.’

The Dark and Dangerous Gifts of Delores Mackenzie

‘Delores felt her stomach fold in on itself. The threat of the Uncles had been looming dark on the horizon for some time, ever since their parents disappeared.’

Cedric e Flapper Skate

‘Flapper skates are muckle beasts – ere’s neen bigger!’

Wintersong

‘Awake and seek a beautiful future for all the Earth and its creatures.’

Empress Irini Series

‘It’s Irini’s life. We all live lives that, looking back, we can see how they are divided into separate books, but it’s still one life.’

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