n the fast disappearing slums of the Claggans district of a big Scottish city, only a few tenements still stand. In this strange half-world a small group of men and women live out one hot summer week of their lives. Experience is heightened by the presence of a maniac among them-a man whom some of them at least must know, a sex killer who already has his eye on his next victim and is planning to strike again. But this is in no way a whodunit. It is a warm and human story of the loves, fears and hopes of simple people: of Mrs Sheehan, feeling lost and useless with her family grown up and gone;...

In his own lifetime and for nearly a hundred years James Hogg was was seen as the natural, if lesser, inheritor of the mantle of Robert Burns. Hogg was "the Ettrick Shepherd," self-taught, author of the long poem The Queen's Wake and numerous poems and songs of Border life and love, befriended by Walter Scott and presented in the pages of Blackwood's Magazine as a colourful, boastful, deep-drinking rustic. But with the American publication in 1824 of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner the picture began to change. This study, first published in 1976, is the first to...

The Fiction of Robin Jenkins is the first ever volume of essays dedicated to Robin Jenkins (1912-2005), hailed by Andrew Marr as the best-kept secret in Modern British Literature, and by the Scotsman in 2000 as the greatest living fiction-writer in Scotland ] the Scottish Thomas Hardy . This new study of Jenkins includes essays across his entire, astonishingly varied body of work. It includes provocative new readings of a range of thematic issues by established experts on Jenkins and on Scottish Literature more broadly. This volume also includes chapters dedicated to individual...