Departure Lounge
Taking Off In 2022
Taking Off In 2022
2022 brings us the Year of Scotland's Stories and BooksfromScotland are delighted to bring you each issue this year celebrating this sharing of our stories. Each month we'll showcase the themes of the Year of Scotland's Stories - iconic stories and storytellers, new stories, Scotland's people and places, local tales and legends, and inspired by nature - and we kick off with January's theme of Afresh. Here, we recommend fiction, poetry, music, memoir and children's books that we hope will rejuvenate and put a spring in your step!
The image used to illustrated Departure Lounge is credited to VisitScotland.
Extract taken from Recovery: The Lost Art of Convalescence By Gavin Francis Published by Wellcome
The word rehabilitation comes from the Latin habilis, ‘to make fit’, and carries the sense of restoration: ‘to stand, make, or be firm again’. The aim of rehabilitation, then, was to make someone as fit as they can be, to be able to stand firmly on their own two feet. And though recovery was the clinicians’ ultimate aim, it’s curious that the words ‘recovery’ and ‘convalescence’ are generally absent from the index of medical textbooks. As long ago as the 1920s, in her essay ‘On Being Ill’, Virginia Woolf wrote that we lack a mode of writing about illness, that it is ‘strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature’. A century on, her assertion no longer holds true: we do have a literature of illness. But I’d argue that we still lack a literature of recovery.
The medicine I was trained in often assumes that once a crisis has passed, the body and mind find ways to heal themselves – there’s almost nothing more to be said on the matter. But after nearly twenty years as a GP I’ve often found that the reverse is true: guidance and encouragement through the process of recovery can be indispensable. Odd as it seems, my patients often need to be granted permission to take the time to recover that they need. Illness is not simply a matter of biology, but one of psychology and sociology. We fall ill in ways t...
The Second Cut By Louise Welsh Published by Canongate
Twenty years is a long time to wait for a sequel, but so completely does Louise Welsh’s The Second Cut shred the clichés of crime fiction, and so convincingly and freshly does it swathe Glasgow in her beyond-noir aesthetic, that it is well worth the wait.
Clichés (or rather, their absence) first. In most crime novels, the beginning is clear enough: there’s been a murder, the police are on the case, a corpse has been discovered and everything will spiral out from that. In The Second Cut, we have to read the whole novel to find out whether or not there’s ...
‘All around us, the future feels bright and never-ending.’
Creative Response – Mrs Death Misses Death
‘I want to feel the benefits of time, to reap the rewards of growing older and reflecting, and to dedicate my time to whatever will help me regard time, not as a chore or something to be endured, but …
‘In the thick of it all I hear Jim Kerr’s voice, an open channel between the music and the swirl of moods and emotions it throws up.’
‘Here, have this poem, it is about your courage, your hope, your triumph, the way we see you’
‘Pride is Man. Sweet routine of morning run and night-time gym, exfoliate for perfect skin then beers to rough it up again.’
Talking History: A Q & A with Joan Haig and Joan Lennon
‘While we cast on and off, she played us famous orations, and sometimes music, on her vinyl record player.’
‘Queer data is a powerful weapon; in the right hands, it can reshape all of our futures.’
‘To move through Edinburgh is to see the echoes of the selves I left behind as I moved and grew, each one a faint outline of the emotion held in that place.’
The Undiscovered Deaths of Grace McGill
‘To do this job you have to be two things that seem at odds with each other; professional and compassionate. Sometimes I’m too much of the second one, and that’s my curse. I do what I do because I car …
‘The Sky Beneath the Stone is the immersive and beautifully written first novel from bold new voice in children’s fiction Alex Mullarky.’
‘That evening, tucked into his tiny bunk, he thought again about the face. The bony head, and the teeth, so sharp. And the eyes… He woke in the dark with a start. Then he laughed to himself at his ima …
‘The memories came flooding back with such intensity that she was rendered breathless. Closing her mouth, Dr Cosgrove swallowed twice, her throat occluded completely. How, after all of these years?’
‘We’ve learnt that it’s more than possible to take a well-loved book series and develop it in new ways.’