Bertie’s back! In the eleventh instalment of Alexander McCall Smith’s bestselling 44 Scotland Street series, we return once more to fiction’s favourite street to catch up with the goings-on of its lively inhabitants.

When writer Paul Stewart heads to the idyllic Italian town of Montalcino to finish his already late book, it seems like the perfect escape from stressful city life and a recent break-up. Upon landing, however, things quickly take a turn for the worse when he discovers his hired car is nowhere to be found.

How far can you go to get what you want? Rachel, a Scottish-Swiss student from Zurich, doesn’t think twice about drugging elderly Lizzie Fairbairn, whose Edinburgh home she invades, and stealing what she feels belongs to her by rights. And then there is Marlene, Rachel’s grandmother, unscrupulous to the point of murder. Now it’s Lizzie’s turn: how far is she prepared to go?

Come and meet some wild men and tame beasts. Explore the fleeting moment and capture the passing of time in these portrait studies which document a year’s journey.

A weathered poet with four decades of fieldwork behind her, Valerie Gillies is a true guide to Scotland and beyond, and this collection affirms the companionship of poetry on the journey. The Cream of the Well contains a rich gathering from her earlier volumes, along with poems never published before.

The eighteen tales in this book have been written from a variety of sources. Some have grown from an idea or theme in a traditional tale; others are concerned with using conventional elements of the folk tale to create an entirely original piece of writing.

The stories in Ali Smith’s new collection are about what we do with books and what they do with us: how they travel with us; how they shock us, change us, challenge us, banish time while making us older, wiser and ageless all at once; how they remind us to pay attention to the world we make.

How to be both is a novel all about art’s versatility. Borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it’s a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There’s a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There’s the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real – and all life’s givens get given a second chance.