Here is the unvarnished, human story behind the infamous Burke and Hare murders. We delve into their past, their personalities and the circumstances that made them resort to murder as a money-making scheme. It’s a tale of desperation and greed, of outsiders, ambition, corruption and betrayal. And it’s all true!

Chronologically, the collection sweeps from the early middle ages to the early twentieth century, from Robert Henryson to J.M. Barrie, conveying a sense of the shifting and subtle identities and continuities of Scottish literary traditions across the centuries, and opening up, through a distinctive and unusual range of writers and texts, unfamiliar aesthetic, cultural, and linguistic landscapes.

A realignment of Scottish literary studies is long overdue. The present volume counters the relative neglect of comparative literature in Scotland by exploring the fortunes of Scottish writing in mainland Europe, and, conversely, the engagement of Scottish literary intellectuals with European texts.

Alexander Smith was apprenticed as a pattern-designer in the muslin trade. Catapulted from obscurity with the publication of A Life-Drama in 1853, his poetry became linked with a new generation of writers who circled below the apparently calm surface of mid-Victorian prosperity. Labelled the Spasmodic School, they were attacked by critics who objected to their unconventional style and lack of scholarship. Simon Berry’s book is an attempt to rescue from history the memory of a great Scottish poet.

Richard fell for Luke at university.

Luke was handsome, dissolute, dangerous; together they did things that Richard has spent the last decade trying to forget.

Now his career is on the brink of success, but his younger sister Stephie’s life is in pieces. Her invasion of Richard’s remote west coast sanctuary forces Richard to confront the tragedy and betrayal of his past, and face up to his own role in what happened back then.

The Glasgow launderette has been a sanctuary for Agnes, Myrna and Siobhan, binding them together in tentative, fragile friendships. But when all three are forced to make vital choices, their lives become caught in a spin which whirls events towards a shocking conclusion …

Pack Men is the fictional story of three pals and one child trapped inside this powderkeg. In a city rocking with beer, brotherhood and sectarianism, the boys struggle to hold onto their friendship, as they turn on each other and the police turn on them. And somehow one of them has to disclose a secret which he knows the others won’t want to hear…

Meet sixteen-year-old Alvin. Poet. Virgin. Confused. Adopted by “the Lads” – three older boys with a car called Belinda and four wheels to anywhere = he begins the crazy road-trip from adolescence to adulthood.