Books set in Scotland

A minister sent to clear the last man off a Shetland island, and the words between them.

Midsummer in Shetland, when it never gets dark: a stranger hanged in a boat shed.

A girl lies dead in the snow at midwinter, and a Shetland village blames its old loner.

Back from London’s nights to the wind, birds and sheep farm of her Orkney childhood.

Orwell’s three years in a farmhouse at the far end of Jura, writing Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Under sail from Galicia to Scotland, looking for the fairies of the Celtic capes.

A drained loch on Lewis gives up a small plane, and the pilot was Fin Macleod’s friend.

A body from a Lewis peat bog, and an old man’s memories of the Hebrides of the 1950s.

A detective returns to Lewis for a murder, and to the gannet hunt on an Atlantic rock.

A young Scotswoman chases the green flash of sunset from Oban to Iona and Staffa.

Dr Johnson at sixty-three rides and sails to Skye, Raasay and Mull with Boswell.

1869: a crofter’s son kills three in a Wester Ross village; his memoir and trial.

1945: a nurse steps through standing stones into the Highlands of 1743.

1751: a cheated heir and a Jacobite outlaw flee across the Highlands after a murder.

A worked-out coal mine near Aberfoyle, a new seam, and a town built underground.

1715: a young Englishman among Glasgow merchants and the MacGregors beyond Loch Lomond.

1745: a young English officer rides into the Highlands and joins Bonnie Prince Charlie.

A child’s body in a ditch, a detective back from sick leave, and rain without end.

A crofter’s daughter in the Mearns, torn between the land and books, as the war comes.

Days before retiring, Rebus investigates the murder of a Russian poet in Edinburgh.

A road-rage attack during the Festival draws strangers into an Edinburgh mystery.

The residents of one New Town tenement, first serialised in an Edinburgh newspaper.

Heroin, friendship and despair among young men in Leith, Edinburgh’s port.

The first Rebus: girls go missing in an Edinburgh the tourists do not see.

1930s: an unorthodox teacher shapes her chosen girls at an Edinburgh school.

1736: the Porteous riot at the Tolbooth, and a dairyman’s daughter who walks to London.

A grumpy squire’s family tours Britain in letters: Bath’s waters, London, Edinburgh.

Two boys, one Protestant, one Catholic, in love on the estates of Glasgow’s East End.

1980s: a boy tries to save his drinking mother, from Sighthill to a dead pit village.

A woman wakes to find her lover dead in her flat, and trusts no one but herself.

Sammy wakes up blind after a weekend drunk, and feels his way home across Glasgow.

Laidlaw again, from a dying vagrant to Glasgow’s hard men and its university.

A sunless city called Unthank, and the Glasgow boyhood of the artist who dreamed it.

A girl dead in Kelvingrove Park, and a detective who doubts everything but the city.