POLYGONNEW TITLES 2015

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FICTION

POETRY

NON-FICTION

NEW EDITIONS

CONTENTSThe Revolving Door of Life Alexander McCall SmithFatty O’Leary’s Dinner Party Alexander McCall SmithStories of Love Alexander McCall SmithWasp Ian GarbuttThe Art of Waiting Christopher JoryLie of the Land Michael F. RussellPenelope’s Web Christopher RushWhispering Shadows Jan-Philipp SendkerDacre’s War Rosemary GoringFriend & Foe Shirley McKayQueen & Country Shirley McKayWhisky from Small Glasses Denzil MeyrickDark Suits and Sad Songs Denzil MeyrickThe Good Priest Gillian GalbraithTroubled Waters Gillian GalbraithBritish Bulldog Sara SheridanAscension Gregory Dowling

The Making of George Wyllie Louise Wyllie and Jan PatienceSixty Degrees North Malachy Tallack

Magicians of Scotland Ron Butlin Beneath Troubled Skies WWII Poetry AnthologyStruileag: Shore to Shore Kevin MacNeil (ed.)#UntitledOne Neu! Reekie! Michael Pedersen and Kevin Williamson (eds)

A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle Hugh MacDiarmidRowing After the White Whale James AdairBarbed Wire Kisses Zoë Howe

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Alexander McCall Smith

Praise for the 44 Scotland Street series:

‘A treasure of a writer whose books deserve immediate devouring’ The Times

‘It is hard to think of a contemporary writer more genuinely engaging...[his] novels are also extremely funny: I find it impossible to think about them without smiling’ Mail on Sunday

‘As charming as the bohemian street in which it’s set’ Daily Record

ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH is one of the world’s most prolific and most popular authors. For many years he was a professor of Medical Law, then, after the publication of his highly successful No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, which has sold over twenty-five million copies, he devoted his time to the writing of fiction and has seen his various series of books translated into over forty-six languages and become bestsellers throughout the world.

The Revolving Door of LifeA 44 Scotland Street Novel

Catch up with all your favourite faces down in Scotland Street as we follow their daily pursuit of a little happiness. The Revolving Door of Life is the tenth book in this series and revolves around the many colourful characters that come and go at No. 44 Scotland Street. McCall Smith handles the characters with his customary charm and deftness – the stalwart Tory chartered surveyor, the pushy mother, and, perhaps most importantly, the beleaguered Italian-speaking prodigy, Bertie. This is classic McCall Smith – clever, witty and entertaining – and beautifully illustrated.

A chance encounter with Armistead Maupin in San Francisco inspired Alexander McCall Smith to write this series of novels based around the fictional No. 44 Scotland Street in Edinburgh’s New Town. On his return to Edinburgh he agreed to write a serial novel through the pages of the Scotsman newspaper. These daily episodes were then published in the first of now ten books, 44 Scotland Street. Today, fans around the world follow the series which continues to appear in the Scotsman for four months every year.

ISBN: 9781846973284 Price: £16.99Format: 216 x 138mm hbkRights: UK & CommonwealthAugust 2015

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Stories of Love

Fatty O’Leary’s Dinner Party

ISBN: 9781846973239Price: £7.99 Format: 198 x 129mm pbkRights: UK & CommonwealthApril 2015176pp

It takes a lot to get under the skin of Cornelius ‘Fatty’ O’Leary, but then there is a lot of skin to get under.

The heroically proportioned Fatty can normally take life as it comes. Right at home in easy-going Fayetteville, Arkansas, he is happily married to his childhood sweetheart Betty, and likes nothing better than the company of good friends Tubby O’Rourke and Porky Flanagan. But when Fatty and Betty head off to Ireland on the trip of a lifetime, they find that they have left their comfort zone far behind. Calamity and mayhem ensue as one mishap after another befalls the beleaguered couple.

Can Fatty’s broad shoulders take the strain or will he suffer one indignity too many? Will he get his just deserts, or just dessert?

Praise for Fatty O’Leary’s Dinner Party:

‘All you can eat platter of humour . . . once again McCall Smith doles out an appropriately extra-large helping of fun’ Scotland on Sunday

‘McCall Smith’s generous writing and dry humour, his gentleness and humanity, and his ability to evoke a place and a set of characters without caricature or condescension have endeared his books to readers’ The New York Times

Shorn of context, unknown people look out to us from old and anonymous photographs, and each image has magical appeal. Alexander McCall Smith, one of the world’s best-loved writers, has reimagined the stories of these individuals in this charming, humorous, unexpected and poignant collection.

The fifteen photographs captured here are all from days long gone – some are formal in setting with a sepia tone, some are hazy family snaps. Every one of these images is powerful and intriguing in its own way and in Alexander’s hands, each reveals a story of love .

ISBN: 9781846973291Price: £9.99Format: 178 x 114mm hbkRights: UK & CommonwealthNovember 2015

9781846972454£9.99 hbk

9781846972638£7.99 pbk

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Ian Garbutt

IAN GARBUTT has worked in journalism and publishing. He was awarded a Scottish Arts Council New Writer’s Bursary and attended Napier University, in Edinburgh, where he obtained a Master of Arts with Distinction in Creative Writing.

WaspOr, A Very Sweet Power

ISBN: 9781846973079 Price: £12.99 Format: 198 x 129mm hbkRights: UK & CommonwealthMarch 2015368pp

For a gentleman seeking more prestigious company amidst the seedy bawdy houses of an eighteenth-century city, the House of Masques provides the perfect no-touch escorts. Girls, highly educated and socially trained, are geisha-like status symbols for politicians, bankers and minor royalty.

Into this world comes Bethany Harris, a disgraced governess who has been rescued from a madhouse and transformed into the Masque named Wasp. She soon discovers that everyone in the House has a troubled past, and personal horrors, coupled with dark ambition, are leading to a crisis that threatens to destroy the House of Masques and everyone in it.

Hummingbird leans forward and clasps Wasp’s knee. ‘We all inhabit a half-world, a demi-monde. It draws admiration yet allows people to socially exclude you in the same turn. Ladies will curse you for a harlot yet slavishly copy your fashion. Society has built a complex house. We can ascend to the top, but only if we are shut in a separate room.’ She gestures at the onlookers’ rapt faces. ‘They all come here to see us. To try and touch the stars. Never underestimate your power. You need only to be spotted in public wearing a new style of choker and within a week a score of society ladies will parrot the fashion. Charm is also a powerful weapon. With it you can turn a papist to a Baptist in the breath of a sentence.’ Wasp peers out of the window. ‘Those men watching, they remind me of hungry dogs.’ Things can get out of hand. Last month the landau belonging to one famous courtesan struck a pothole as big as a pit and snapped the axle. Her carriage was mobbed. Grown men scrambled like urchins around a dropped farthing. Items were snatched: a strip of lace from her sleeve, a bead from her reticule. She was plundered like a shipwreck.’ Hummingbird laughed. ‘Don’t go so wide-eyed, Sister. Leonardo will look after us. Sit back and enjoy the ride.’

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WaspOr, A Very Sweet Power

Christopher Jory

CHRISTOPHER JORY was born in 1968 in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He spent his early childhood in Barbados, Venezuela and finally Oxfordshire. He did a degree in English Literature and Philosophy at Leicester University and then worked as an English teacher for the British Council and other organisations in Italy, Spain, Crete, Brazil and Venezuela. He is currently a Publisher at Cambridge University Press. His first book, Lost in the Flames (Troubadour, 2012), is a moving account of RAF Bomber Command airmen and their families.

The Art of Waiting

ISBN: 9781846973086 Price: £12.99Format: 198 x 129mm hbkRights: WorldApril 2015304pp

Russia, 1943. A girl from Leningrad and a soldier from Venice stand together on the edge of wilderness. He is a shadow of a man, trapped behind wire, an enemy in her land. Taking something from her pocket, she slips her hand through the wire and catches her skin on a barb, producing a tiny drop of blood. ‘Have this.’ The man takes the gift – a small crust of bread, a little piece of hope. Its memory will nourish him, keep him alive, on his long journey home to Italy.

But when he returns, he must decide which path to take – to be true to the love of the girl who saved his life, or to pursue his unfulfilled vow and seek revenge on the man who had ruined his home and his family.

‘A profoundly moving novel with echoes of Vasily Grossman that sweeps you from Russia to Italy over the course of a gripping, richly evocative and atmospheric tale’ Alex Preston

A whistle blew and the trucks pulled away and as he was passing out through the gate, Aldo looked over to where the Romanian stood digging at the earth beneath the gaze of the guard. Then the guard looked at his watch and raised his rifle. The Romanian stopped digging and looked at the guard. There was the sound of a shot and the Romanian fell into the semi-dug grave. Aldo spent the rest of the day chopping logs into bits, lifting the dead weight of his axe time after time, but all the while he thought of Katerina. What on earth had compelled her to come over to him, to risk herself for him? Why him out of all the others in the camp? And anyway, wasn’t he the enemy? Shouldn’t she be afraid of him? Shouldn’t she hate his guts? As he dwelt on what she had done, he allowed himself to dream, that one day the world might be at peace and he and Katerina might meet again after the war, and she would come to visit him at his home in Venice, and he would show the most beautiful person in the world the most beautiful city that had ever existed. And they would be together there forever, that’s how it would be.

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Michael F. Russell

Lie of the Land

ISBN: 9781846973192Price: £12.99Format: 198 x 129mm hbkRights: WorldJune 2015

Trapped in a post-apocalyptic Highland village, city journalist Carl Shewan struggles to cope with the death of the only other person who knows the truth behind this brutal new reality.

As a new order asserts itself among the survivors, Carl’s relationship with the mother of his unborn child, and with the wider community, comes under increasing strain until a local gamekeeper offers him an alternative to guilt and alienation.

Set in a near-future Scotland, Lie of the Land dissects the psyche of the outsider and questions how far the state will go to preserve an ordered society.

MICHAEL F. RUSSELL grew up on Barra before leaving to study Social Sciences at the University of Glasgow, followed by a postgraduate diploma in Journalism Studies at the University of Strathclyde. He is deputy editor at the West Highland Free Press and writes occasionally for the Sunday Herald. His writing has appeared in Gutter, Northwords Now and Fractured West. He lives on Skye with his partner and two children. Some way off the road was a derelict old house,

windowless, with a ragged corrugated-iron roof. To his left, the hills rose to the fissured rocky summit of Ben Bronach, and beyond, to the deer forest. After a few minutes Carl got up and, standing at the roadblock with his hands in his coat pockets, considered the road ahead. He stepped over the painted boulders. Maybe today was the day when the world would open up again. He could drive away from Inverlair. He could leave Room 14 and Simone and the baby, today, the eighty-second day of his confinement. This would be the last day he’d have to spend here, in this prison refuge. The redzone would open. Its signal would fail. He took Howard’s deltameter out of his pocket and watched the EMF waveform on the screen, spiking at 85 microtesla today, close to the active neural level. Another hundred metres or so and, he knew, the buzzing sound would start in his head. Another two hundred after that and the pain would skewer through his head, from temple to temple. Any further and sleep was death. Today was not the day. But he’d known that anyway. There would be no escape. Even before he took his dead friend’s gadget out of his pocket to check the signal he knew what it would tell him.

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Praise for Will:

‘Startlingly poetic – excellent’ The Spectator

‘This fictional autobiography does more than eulogize – Burgess is the only other novelist to pass this test’Times Literary Supplement

9781846972782£9.99 pbk

Christopher Rush

Penelope’s Web

ISBN: 9781846973093Price: £14.99Format: 198 x 129mm hbkRights: WorldAugust 2015

Odysseus returns to Ithaca after nearly twenty years, half of it spent as a soldier and the other half as a soldier of fortune. During his absence his wife Penelope remains faithful, despite Odysseus being missing and presumed dead, but when her husband suddenly reappears he confronts those who have been trying to seduce his wife and kills them all.

This is a novel about war and peace, about how returning soldiers can find peace more horrible than war, and home more hellish than the battlefield.

CHRISTOPHER RUSH was born in St Monans and taught literature for thirty years in Edinburgh. His books include A Twelvemonth and a Day and the highly acclaimed To Travel Hopefully. A Twelvemonth and a Day served as inspiration for the film Venus Peter, released in 1989. The story was also reworked by Rush in a simplified version in 1992 as a children’s picture book, Venus Peter Saves the Whale, illustrated by Mairi Hedderwick, which won the Friends of the Earth 1993 Earthworm Award for the book published that year that would most help children to enjoy and care for the Earth.

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Praise for Whispering Shadows:

‘An absorbing mystery set in a Hong Kong tourists only glimpse—the dark underside of a money-making beehive trying to find its place in a cynically corrupt new China. Vivid and knowing’ Joseph Kanon, New York Times bestselling author of Leaving Berlin

9781846972409£8.99 pbk

Jan-Philipp Sendker

Whispering Shadows

ISBN: 9781846973307Price: £8.99Format: 198 x 129mm pbkRights: UK & Commonwealth exc. CanadaJune 2015

Paul Leibovitz was once an ambitious advisor, dedicated father, and loving husband. But after living for nearly thirty years in Hong Kong, personal tragedy strikes and Paul’s marriage unravels in the fallout.

When he makes a fleeting connection with Elizabeth, a distressed American woman on the verge of collapse, his life is thrown into turmoil. Less than twenty-four hours later, Elizabeth’s son is found dead in Shenzhen, and Paul, invigorated by a newfound purpose, sets out to investigate the murder on his own.

As Paul, Elizabeth, and a detective friend descend deeper into the Shenzhen underworld they discover dark secrets hidden beneath China’s booming new wealth. In a country where rich businessmen with expensive degrees can corrupt the judicial system, the potential for evil abounds.

JAN-PHILIPP SENDKER lives in Berlin with his family. He was the American correspondent for Stern from 1990 to 1995, and its Asian correspondent from 1995 to 1999. The Art of Hearing Heartbeats, his first novel, was an international bestseller, and he’s the author of A Well-Tempered Heart, Whispering Shadows and its sequel Dragon Games. He is currently at work on the third novel set in Hong Kong.

9781846972850£8.99 pbk

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Rosemary Goring

Dacre’s War

ISBN: 9781846973116 Price: £14.99Format: 215 x 153mm hbkRights: UK & Commonwealth excl CanadaJune 2015

The sequel to Rosemary Goring’s acclaimed After Flodden, Dacre’s War is a story of personal and political vengeance. Ten years after the battle of Flodden, Adam Crozier, head of his clan and of an increasingly powerful alliance of Borderers, learns for sure that it was Lord Thomas Dacre – now the most powerful man in the north of England – who ordered his father’s murder. He determines to take his revenge. As a fighting man, Crozier would like nothing better than to bring Dacre down face to face but his wife Louise advises him that he must use more subtle methods. So he sets out to engineer Dacre’s downfall by turning the machinery of the English court against him.

A vivid and fast-moving tale of political intrigue and heartache, Dacre’s War is set against the backdrop of the Scottish and English borders, a land where there is never any chance of peace.

ROSEMARY GORING was born in Dunbar and studied social and economic history at the University of St Andrews. She was the literary editor of Scotland on Sunday, followed by a brief spell as editor of Life & Work, the Church of Scotland’s magazine, before returning to newspapers as literary editor of the Herald, and later also of the Sunday Herald. In 2007 she published Scotland: The Autobiography: 2000 Years of Scottish History By Those Who Saw it Happen, which has since been published in America and Russia.

Praise for After Flodden:

‘A swashbuckling tale in the best tradition of adventure fiction ... charged with melancholy and menace’ Times Literary Supplement

‘Goring has a fine story to tell, a keen sense of place, and the ability to evoke mood. It’s a compelling and gripping novel’ Scotsman

The Fleet Prison, 1488-9 The river seeped into his clothes, food and dreams. In the first few days after the key turned in the lock behind him and the bolts were thrown, the stench of oily water and tidal slime was his only companion. The cell’s walls glistened, as if from the poisonous breath that crept under the iron door and through the shuttered bars. A hand put to the bare bricks came away damp and smelling of rot. Some nights he caught a whiff of putrid flesh, borne downstream at a doleful pace. Whether it was a corpse, a dead cat, or merely butcher’s scraps, he did not care to know. He pulled his cloak over his nose and turned to the wall, hoping for a cleansing breeze to freshen the air. Weeks later, it had yet to appear. After Christmas came the cold. London turned white and brittle under frost and snow, and though the prisoner’s meagre ration of coal did no more than melt the icicles on the low ceiling, he did not complain. The chill had cleared the air. As he rubbed his knuckles and stamped his feet, he found his appetite. Wolfing the bread and broth his servant brought each evening, he longed for ale and lark pies, for roasted boar and hot-smoked eels, but such fare was not allowed in this place. Each day his ribs lost an ounce more fat, in time growing as taut to the touch as the bars at his needle-thin window.

9781846972720£14.99 hbk

9781846972836£8.99 pbk

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Friend & FoeA Hew Cullan Mystery NEW EDITION

SHIRLEY McKAY was born in Tynemouth but now lives with her family in Fife. At the age of fifteen she won the Young Observer playwriting competition, her play being performed at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs. She went on to study English and Linguistics at the University of St Andrews before attending Durham University for postgraduate study in Romantic and Seventeenth-Century prose. Shirley was shortlisted for the CWA Debut Dagger.

ISBN: 9781846973222Price: £8.99 Format: 198 x 129mm pbkRights: World English LanguageFebruary 2015320pp

Shirley McKay

Queen & CountryA Hew Cullan Mystery

ISBN: 9781846973123Price: £12.99Format: 229 x 150mm pbkRights: World English LanguageSeptember 2015

Praise for Friend & Foe:

‘Intoxicating mix of dramatic crime and repressed passion’ New Books 1587. Three years after his enforced

departure to London, Hew is reconciled with King James VI and recalled to Scotland. He elopes to St Andrews with a young Englishwoman. The death of Mary, Queen of Scots has unleashed a wave of anti-English sentiment among the Scottish people, and fear and confusion in the king himself. James will grant his blessing to their controversial marriage on the condition that Hew discovers what lies behind a painting cunningly contrived to prick the young king’s conscience. Meanwhile in St Andrews, the death of a painter is troubling to Giles Locke, and the English Frances, struggling to adapt to a foreign town and culture, helps Hew find the link among the artists and intrigues of opposing courts, a quest for love – and life – requiring all his skills.

St Andrews, 1583. The young King James VI is confined at Falkland Palace, plotting his escape. Dissension rages between Kirk and Crown, the king and his ‘lord enterprisers’, and between the separate factions of the church. In St Andrews Castle, a bishop in decline plays out his darkest fantasies, while Hew and his friend Giles investigate the true source of his sickness, uncovering corruption at its heart. The death of a young soldier, implicating Hew’s sister and Giles’s wife Meg, leads Hew to an astonishing discovery, and towards his blackest hour, his fortunes inextricable from those of James himself.

9781846971525£8.99 pbk

9781846971808£8.99 pbk

9781846972188£8.99 pbk

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Denzil Meyrick

Whisky from Small GlassesA D.C.I. Daley Thriller

DENZIL MEYRICK was born in Glasgow and brought up in Campbeltown. After studying politics, he pursued a varied career including time spent as a police officer, freelance journalist, and director of several companies in the engineering, leisure and marketing sectors. He lives in Loch Lomondside with his wife Fiona.

ISBN: 9781846973215Price: £8.99Format: 198 x 129mm pbkRights: English language (UK, Europe & Commonwealth)February 2015368pp

Dark Suits and Sad SongsA D.C.I. Daley Thriller

ISBN: 9781846973154Price: £8.99 Format: 198 x 129mm pbkRights English language (UK, Europe & Commonwealth)May 2015

Praise for Whisky From Small Glasses:

‘Touches of dark humour, multi-layered and compelling’ Daily Record

‘The right amount of authenticity ... gritty writing ... most memorable’ Herald

‘Has the ability to give even the least important person in the plot character and the skill to tell a good tale’ Scots Magazine

‘Rebus meets Taggart’Lovereading

9781846972881£8.99 pbk

When the body of a young woman is washed up on an idyllic beach on the west coast of Scotland, D.C.I. Jim Daley is despatched from Glasgow to lead the investigation. Far from home, and his troubled marriage, it seems that Daley’s biggest obstacle will be managing the difficult local police chief; but when the prime suspect is gruesomely murdered, the inquiry begins to stall. As the body count rises, Daley uncovers a network of secrets and corruption in the close-knit community of Kinloch, thrusting him and his loved ones into the centre of a case more deadly than he had ever imagined. The first novel in the D.C.I. Daley Thriller series, Whisky from Small Glasses is a truly compelling crime novel, shot through with dark humour and menace.

When a senior Edinburgh civil servant spectacularly takes his own life in Kinloch harbour, D.C.I. Jim Daley comes face to face with the murky world of politics. To add to his woes, two local drug dealers lie dead, ritually assassinated. It’s clear that dark forces are at work in the town. With his boss under investigation, his marriage hanging on by a thread, and his sidekick DS Scott wrestling with his own demons, Daley’s world is in meltdown. When strange lights appear in the sky over Kinloch, it becomes clear that the townsfolk are not the only people at risk. The fate of nations is at stake.

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The Good PriestA Father Vincent Ross Mystery

GILLIAN GALBRAITH grew up near Haddington. For seventeen years she was an advocate specialising in medical negligence and agricultural law cases. She also worked for a spell as an agony aunt in teenagers’ magazines. Since then, she has been the legal correspondent for the Scottish Farmer and has written law reports for The Times. She lives deep in the country near Kinross with her husband and daughter, plus assorted cats, dogs, hens and bees.

ISBN: 9781846973109Price: £7.99 Format: 198 x 129mm pbk Rights: World English LanguageApril 2015256pp

Gillian Galbraith

Troubled WatersAn Alice Rice Mystery

ISBN: 9781846973161Price: £7.99Format: pbkRights: World English LanguageSeptember 2015

Praise for Gillian Galbraith:

‘The new Rebus’ Sunday Express

‘Highly readable’ Alexander McCall Smith

‘An author to watch’ Publishing News

‘[Galbraith] offers a much needed female perspective on the city and the genre’ Scottish Field

A man lies in a pool of blood at the bishop’s house, and the comfortable and uneventful existence of Father Vincent Ross is about to be turned upside down. Ugly secrets are being concealed by the church that he serves, and a murderer is on the loose and getting closer by the minute.

Unable to rely upon the police and armed only with his own intelligence, he sets out to stop the killer but, in so doing, the accidental detective finds he is now the prey.

A young, disabled girl is lost on a winter’s night in Leith, unable to help herself or find her way home. Someone is combing the streets, frantically searching for her. A body is washed up on Beamer Rock, a tiny island in the Forth. No sooner has Detective Inspector Alice Rice managed to discover the identity of that body than another one is washed up on the edge of the estuary, in Belhaven Bay. What is the connection between the two bodies? Has the killer any other victims in their sights and if so, can Alice solve the puzzle before another life is taken? In this novel, the sixth in the series, appearances belie reality, and truths and falsehoods gradually merge, becoming indistinguishable.

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Fiction

Sara Sheridan

SARA SHERIDAN was educated at Trinity College, Dublin. Sara’s first novel Truth or Dare was nominated for a Saltire Prize and was included in the Top 100 Books in the Scottish Libraries Award. Her other novels are Ma Polinski’s Pockets, The Pleasure Express, The Blessed and the Damned, The Secret Mandarin, Secret of the Sands and her earlier Mirabelle Bevan mysteries, Brighton Belle, London Calling and England Expects. Sara sits on the board of the writers’ collective, 26, and has recently finished a three-year term on the committee of the Society of Authors in Scotland. She guest blogs regularly (for BBC News magazine, the Guardian and the Huffington Post) and has reported from Estonia and United Arab Emirates for BBC Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent as well as appearing on Woman’s Hour as an expert in the history of the British lady.

British BulldogA Mirabelle Bevan Mystery

ISBN: 9781846973253 Price: £16.99Format: 234 x 156mm hbkRights: World English LanguageMay 2015

British Bulldog is the fourth instalment in Sara Sheridan’s best-selling 1950s murder mystery series featuring stylish sleuth Mirabelle Bevan. Following a mystery bequest, Mirabelle sets out on the trail of an RAF pilot who went missing during World War II. Her search takes her to Paris, where she finds herself digging into the activities of Resistance fighters and ex-Nazis, whose lives are defined by the political climate of Cold War Europe. The bequest raises issues closer to home than she expects and as the story unravels Mirabelle is forced to confront the truth about her wartime lover Jack and the true nature of their relationship.

Praise for the series:

‘Mirabelle has a dogged tenacity to rival Poirot’ Sunday Herald

‘Unfailingly stylish, undeniably smart’Daily Record

‘Plenty of colour and action, will engage the reader from the first page to the last. Highly recommended’Bookbag

9781846972430 £16.99 hbk

9781846972812 £16.99 hbk

9781846972287 £7.99 pbk

9781846972652 £7.99 pbk

9781846972904 £7.99 pbk

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Fiction & Non-Fiction

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The Making of George WyllieTales and Sails

Louise Wyllie and Jan Patience

I Knew George Wyllie has been co-written by his elder daughter, Louise Wyllie, and arts journalist Jan Patience. Containing never-before-seen images and fresh insight into his influences and early life, this book seeks to answer questions about the forces which shaped Wyllie’s unique world-view.

The voyage begins with Wyllie’s Glasgow childhood; a period ‘disadvantaged by happiness’ – and moves on to time spent serving in the Pacific with the Royal Navy during WWII, when he witnessed first-hand the devastation caused by an atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima.

After the war, like Robert Burns and Adam Smith before him, Wyllie became an Excisemen. He made ‘time for art’ in his forties, going on to create memorable public art works such as the life-sized Straw Locomotive, which hung from the Finnieston Crane in Glasgow, and the giant sea-worthy Paper Boat, with the letters QM (Question Mark) on her side.

By the time of his death at the age of ninety in 2012, Wyllie had laid out his vision of himself as the artist-shaman, arrow in hand, making a last Cosmic Voyage.

ISBN: 9781846973062September 2015

GREGORY DOWLING studied English at Christ Church, Oxford where he obtained a First Class Degree. He moved to Venice in 1981, where he is Associate Professor of American Literature at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Gregory has published four novels, co-edited two anthologies of poetry, and written various non-fiction books and academic articles.

AscensionMurder Most Serene

ISBN: 9781846973130Price: £12.99 Format: 198 x 129mm hbkRights: WorldSeptember 2015

This novel is set in Venice in the mid-eighteenth century, when the city had lost its political and financial primacy but had become Europe’s pleasure capital, famous for its gambling dens, its courtesans, its hectic carnival, its music, art and theatre – and the most highly organised secret service in Europe. The hero-narrator is Alvise Marangon, a Venetian in his early twenties who is unwillingly recruited into the Secret Service. Ascension is a witty, pacy spy thriller.

Gregory Dowling

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Non-Fiction

The Making of George WyllieTales and Sails

Louise Wyllie and Jan Patience

MALACHY TALLACK has written for the New Statesman, the Guardian, the Scottish Review of Books, Caught By the River and many other publications, online and in print. He won a New Writers Award from the Scottish Book Trust in 2014, and the Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship in 2015. As a singer-songwriter he has released four albums and an EP, and performed in venues across the UK. He is editor of the online magazine The Island Review, and co-editor of Fair Isle: Through the Seasons. He is from Shetland, and currently lives in Glasgow.

ISBN: 9781846973369Price: £12.99 Format: 198 x 129mm hbkRights: WorldJuly 2015208pp

The sixtieth parallel marks a kind of borderland. It wraps itself around the lower reaches of Finland, Sweden and Norway; it crosses the tip of Greenland and of Southcentral Alaska; it cuts the great spaces of Russia and Canada in half. The parallel also passes through Shetland, at the very top of the British Isles.

In Sixty Degrees North, Malachy Tallack explores the places that share this latitude, beginning and ending in Shetland, where he has spent most of his life. The book focuses on the landscapes and natural environments of the parallel, and the way that people have interacted with those landscapes. It explores themes of wildness and community, of isolation and engagement, of exile and memory.

In addition, it is also a deeply personal book, which begins with the author’s loss of his father and his troubled relationship with Shetland. Informed by the journeys described, it moves towards a kind of resolution: an acceptance of loss, and ultimately a love of the place Tallack calls ‘home’.

Sixty Degrees North

Malachy Tallack

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Poetry

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Published in association with the SCOTTISH POETRY LIBRARY.

Edited by LIZZIE MACGREGOR.

Beneath Troubled SkiesPoems of Scotland at War 1914–1918

Published in September 2015 to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Loos, this anthology traces the progress of Scotland’s war through poetry written by serving soldiers and those on the home front. Includes Charles Hamilton Sorley, E.A. Mackintosh, R.Watson Kerr, Joseph Lee, Charles Murray, May Wedderburn Cannan, Mary Symon.

Foreword by Professor Sir Hew Strachan, and chapter introductions by Yvonne McEwan.

ISBN: 9781846973321 Price: £12.99 hbk Format: 216 x 138mm pbkRights: WorldSeptember 2015208pp

Ron Butlin

RON BUTLIN is an award-winning poet, playwright, novelist, short story writer and librettist whose works have been translated into many languages. He regularly gives creative writing workshops in schools, and was Edinburgh Makar from 2008 to 2014.Polygon published The Magicians of Edinburgh in 2012 and it has since reprinted five times. The Magicians of Scotland will be published by Polygon in August 2015.

Magicians of Scotland

ISBN: 9781846972911Price: £9.99Format: 198 x 129mm pbkRights: WorldAugust 2015112pp

The Magicians of Scotland builds upon the success of The Magicians of Edinburgh (reprinted five times) and on that book’s critical acclaim. Ron Butlin is the former Edinburgh Makar and this collection seeks to celebrate and interrogate Scotland and its people at a crucial turning point in our country’s history. Just as The Magicians of Edinburgh’s themes ranged from Sir Walter Scott to the new Parliament, from Greyfriar’s Bobby to the trams, the themes of the new collection – accessible, thought-provoking and entertaining –include Scotland’s past, present and future, its landscape and people, its myths and politics.

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Poetry

Struileag/Shore to Shore is an international, multi-strand arts project which explores the modern Scottish Gaelic Diaspora and is gathering stories from across the globe. A ‘struileag’ was an imaginary boat used at traditional cèilidhs, where a person would ‘pass the struileag on’ to the next storyteller or singer for them to take their turn. The two-year project incorporates a large-scale multimedia show, ‘Children of the Smoke / Clann a’ Cheò’, which premiered during the 2014 Commonwealth games in Glasgow, an album of groundbreaking new Gaelic song, a book of poetry and essays, a BBC art film and an international online storytelling project.

ISBN: 9781846973178Price: £9.99 Format: 198 x 156mm pbkRights: WorldMarch 2015120pp

The descendants of the Gaels are scattered far and wide across the world – a diaspora that is at once cherished and overlooked. This unique, heartfelt book brings vividly to life through raps, secular psalms, love poems and aphorisms the Gaelic experience as it was, as it is and as it might be.

Shore to Shore/Cladach gu Cladach is a vital legacy of the multimedia project Struileag, at the heart of which lies poetry, and is a demonstration that inside every culture is to be found the whole human condition.

Edited by Kevin MacNeil.

Struileag: Shore to ShoreCladach gu Cladach

Struileag (various authors)Michael Pedersen and Kevin Williamson

Edinburgh born MICHAEL PEDERSEN has published two celebrated chapbooks, and a debut collection Play with Me with Polygon. He is a Canongate Future 40, a 2010 Callum McDonald Memorial Award Finalist, the John Mather’s Charitable Trust Rising Star of Literature 2014, as well as a budding playwright and lyricist, and the co-founder of Neu! Reekie!

KEVIN WILLIAMSON is the author of one book of poetry, In a Room Darkened (2007, Two Ravens Press). His babies include Rebel Inc., Bella Caledonia and Neu! Reekie!

#UntitledOne Neu! Reekie! Publishing #1

ISBN: 9781846973345Price: £12.99 Format: 234 x 156mm pbkRights: WorldMay 2015112pp

With no hype, no paid ads, just word of mouth, Neu! Reekie! was launched in Edinburgh’s Old Town in January 2011. Now into its fifth year, Neu! Reekie! is based at the Summerhall Arts complex and has organised over seventy cultural showcases featuring the spoken word, animation and live music.

#UntitledOne is their first publication and features 31 poets who have performed live at Neu! Reekie! events. Many of the works are new, many are favourites; all are savoured, sublime and sumptuous voices within poetry already. Contributors include Irvine Welsh, Douglas Dunn, Liz Lochhead, Ron Butlin, Jenni Fagan, Hollie McNish and William Letford.

#UntitledOne

‘Neu! Reekie! dismantles the structures and snobberies dividing high and low art— art is for everyone’

—The Skinny

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ISBN 978-1-84697-334-5

£12.99cover design: Gerry cambridgeillustrations: Jenny soep

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New Editions

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ZOË HOWE is a music author whose other books include the acclaimed Typical Girls? The Story of the Slits; ‘How’s Your Dad?’ Living in the Shadow of a Rock Star Parent, British Beat Explosion – Rock n’ Roll Island and Dr Feelgood guitarist Wilko Johnson’s memoir Looking Back At Me, published by Cadiz Music in 2012. Her writing has also appeared in The Quietus, Company, Notion, BBC Music, Holy Moly, Classic Rock and NME. Zoë has also made music radio series for stations including the award-winning Resonance FM, and she can be heard talking about rock n’ roll from time to time on BBC 6 Music, Absolute Radio, Planet Rock, BBC London and elsewhere.

‘Barbed Wire Kisses traces the tale of one of the coolest, most original and uncompromising British bands ever – a fitting tribute to the men in black’ Loud and Quiet

‘A great book. Really funny and honest’ Alan McGee

‘The Mary Chain were the best thing since punk rock’ Bobby Gillespie

‘One of the best – and funniest – books I’ve read about music’ Seat in the Stalls

Barbed Wire KissesThe Jesus and Mary Chain StoryNEW EDITIONMusically, culturally and in terms of sheer attitude, The Jesus and Mary Chain stand alone. Their seminal debut album Psychocandy would change the course of popular music, and their distinctive blend of psychotic white noise, dark lyrics and a pop sensibility continues to enchant and confound to this day. This book takes us behind the wall of distortion to reveal the fierce, frank and often funny tale of The Jesus and Mary Chain, told by the band members and their associates for the first time. As the band celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of Psychocandy, author Zoë Howe charts each step of the Mary Chain’s journey up to the present day, chronicling the formation of the group, their incendiary live performances, the Reids’ powerful songcraft and those famous fraternal tensions that would prepare Creation Records boss Alan McGee for the onslaught of the Gallaghers. Thirty years after the Mary Chain formed, it is time this influential group and sometime ‘public enemy’ had their say. Includes new and exclusive interviews with Jim Reid, Douglas Hart, Bobby Gillespie, Alan McGee, Murray Dalglish, Laurence Verfaillie, John Moore, Ben Lurie, Stephen Pastel and many others.

ISBN: 9781846973314Price: £9.99 Format: 198 x 129mm pbkRights: UK & CommonwealthApril 2015304pp

Zoë Howe

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New Editions

JAMES ADAIR read Modern History at the University of St Andrews. He worked for two years as the editor of the Alderney Journal, perhaps the world’s smallest paid-for newspaper, wrote a column in the Guernsey Press and wrote freelance articles for The Times’ Books and News sections. To finance his dream of rowing an ocean he took a job as a shipbroker with HSBC in London. In the aftermath of his and Ben’s incredible journey, he has returned to shipbrokerage and is currently based in Ghana.

Rowing After the White WhaleA Crossing of the Indian Ocean by HandPAPERBACK EDITION‘A challenge like few others – one that requires total commitment and perseverance in the face of Mother Nature often at her most terrifying. I have huge respect for this brave duo. They knew that the blisters and pain wouldn’t last forever! An epic achievement’ Bear Grylls

Over a boozy Sunday lunch, flatmates James Adair and Ben Stenning make a promise to row across the Indian Ocean, longer and tougher than the Atlantic and which fewer people have rowed across than walked on the Moon. Neither James nor Ben have any rowing or sailing experience. To add to this, James had contracted Guillain-Barre syndrome at the age of fourteen, which had left him with paralysed feet. This was a challenge that neither man should have ever considered . . .

ISBN: 9781846973277Price: £8.99 Format: 198 x 129mm pbkRights: WorldMarch 2015272pp

A Drunk Man Looks at the ThistleEdited by Kenneth ButhlayNEW EDITION

ISBN: 9781846970269Price: £12.99 Format: 198 x 129mm pbkRights: WorldFebruary 2015264pp

Hugh MacDiarmid’s masterpiece in Scots, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, is a richly rewarding work encompassing fine lyrics, hard-hitting satires of contemporary Scotland and displays of metaphysical wit. The stream of consciousness of the ‘drunk man’ of the poem twists and turns as he reflects on the fate of the nation, the human condition in general and his own personal fears.

Kenneth Buthlay’s thoroughly annotated and glossed edition of MacDiarmid’s work is widely considered to be definitive, guiding the reader through the poem’s often dense allusions and complex language.

HUGH MACDIARMID was born Christopher Murray Grieve in 1892 in the Scottish Borders. He started out as a journalist before joining the Royal Army Medical Corps on the outbreak of WWI. MacDiarmid was an ardent believer in socialism, later communism, and he was a founding member of the Scottish National Party in 1928. A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle was MacDiarmid’s second poetry collection, published in 1926. He died in 1978.

Hugh MacDiarmidJames Adair

www.polygonbooks.co.uk