Books like And the Land Lay Still — picked by fans

I loved the Glaswegian (quasi-Irish!) voice of Shuggie Bain, but what I will always remember it for is its gut-wrenching depiction of the consequences of poverty and alcoholism for the titular child character. 

There were times when I was reading this novel that I literally flinched from it. It’s one of the most poignant times that I can remember having such a visceral reaction to a book. 

What I found truly remarkable was the book’s sense of simultaneous inevitability and hope. At once, I felt that there was only one possible end for Agnes and Shuggie, and yet I also somehow believed that both characters would escape their miserable situation.

This idea, that hope sustains even against the most improbable odds, accesses something fundamentally human. A book that can do that is one I would recommend any day.

The most “please don’t do it” I have felt in response to a story is as Gray’s protagonist Thaw empties his pockets and throws his life documents and identifying possessions from a moving train on his way to his moment of madness. This will transpose or transform or, I suppose we must, translate Thaw into Lanark.

Critics have noted the many madcap imaginative moments in Gray’s large (in every sense) debut novel. The sequencing of the parts alone (Part 3, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 4) is enough to signal we are in no realist story of a boy and man’s life in Glasgow – more, think surrealist – and yet the book is also just that, and Glasgow is a hell called Unthank in the imagination of an artist who lived all his life in Glasgow.

Scabby Queen opens with the death by suicide of Clio Campbell, at different times a popstar, a political activist, a lover of life.

The book stretches back five decades to tell her story, from different perspectives and jumping around between time periods. I really love that such a complicated, strong, and uncompromising woman gets to take centre stage in a story that is both political (poll tax riots, miners’ strikes, Brexit) and personal.

I’ve passed by characters like these in the street and was once chased two miles down Paisley Road West at two o’clock in the morning by a gang of very inebriated youths, so reading Armstrong’s semi-autobiographical novel about growing up in the North Lanarkshire gang culture was challenging and engaging. It was challenging because it is written in the “patter” or dialect of central Scotland, and I found m’sel’ readin’ wi an accent in ma heid. Pure mental.

I love this book because it takes me to the far north (where I used to live).

It takes me back to the wide skies, jagged cliffs, pounding waves, miles of rough open land, and seals gazing at you from every bay and cove. I love reading old traditional tales because, as a writer, they feed me, and give me ideas for new stories.

I’ve never read anything like The Living Mountain. A book that is, at once, an autobiography of a remarkable yet under-celebrated woman writer and an exploration of the ecstasies of experiencing the world through the body and its senses.

In gorgeously vivid prose, Shepherd invites us to pursue depth over breadth and to rely upon our felt experience as a way of knowing in the world. This book challenges dominant “hero’s journey” narratives in both content and form and suggests that all we yearn to experience and know can be found right where we find ourselves, wherever that may be. 

A poignant, passionate retelling of The Seven Wild Swans set in an alternate Scotland, this gorgeous book stars a prickly, fierce girl who will do anything to save her brothers from a wicked enchantment. Rowenna’s mother Mairead dies before she can teach Rowenna the magical craft she is so desperate to learn. But when Mairead seemingly comes back from the dead, Rowenna is powerless to defeat the evil creature wearing her face, who proceeds to curse Rowenna, her brothers, and the boy named Gawen Rowenna rescued from the sea. The boys are turned into swans by day, only shifting back to their human forms at night. Rowenna herself is robbed of her voice by day. There is only one thing that can save her brothers and herself—shirts woven out of stinging nettles. But can she weave the shirts before time runs out?

This is the story of a woman who is having a hard time personally, and she swims to heal herself. She swims to reconnect with her wild nature. And she is brave. She swims in all seasons, all weathers, all conditions. Once she was almost pushed against craggy rocks.

I swim too. I love seals, and know this act of taking to the water - our small bit of wild - to reconnect with my wild nature.

I loved the vulnerability that shines through in this book and I like to read of strong women who dare connect with nature to empower themselves. I feel I do that (a bit) and people like Victoria inspire me to push those wild boundaries a little more.

I loved this book because I was able to find out more about this lynchpin of the indie music World of the 80s and 90s that I grew up in. Primal Scream was responsible for some iconic tunes, and learning more about Bobby was insightful and entertaining. I discovered so much that I didn’t know about the band’s musical journey and Bobby's influences.

Witch Wood tells the story of a high-minded, ardent and scholarly young Presbyterian minister, David Sempill, who is called to a benighted Tweeddale parish in 1645 at the time of the War of Three Kingdoms, and how his desire to root out covert witchcraft amongst some of his most ‘devout’ parishioners at a time of civil war and plague leads to tragedy and exile. The Marquis of Montrose, on whose biography John Buchan was working at the same time, has a walk-on part in the story. John Buchan considered this his best work of fiction, and I agree.