Stay a while, take a look around
At Birlinn Ltd, we are home to the finest writing from an astonishing list of authors ranging across nearly every subject area from history to sport, fiction to poetry, children’s titles to academic works.
Check out the ON SALE NOW page where we hope to tempt you to try something new. And stop by the LATEST pages for author interviews, extracts, videos, events and more.
There’s always something new going on.
Birlinn – Publishing in Scotland for the World.
BREXIT UPDATE
We have temporarily suspended our deliveries to Europe. As soon as transporting to Europe becomes feasible over the coming months this service will resume.
Latest Releases
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Paperback | Pub: 06 May 2021£8.99Twelve-year-old Ko Bo Bo lives with his uncle U Ba in Kalaw, a town in Burma. An unusually perceptive child, Bo Bo can read people’s emotions in their eyes. This acute sensitivity only makes his unconventional home life more difficult: His father…
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Hardback | Pub: 06 May 2021£20.00Scotland has its rugged Hebrides; Ireland its cliff-girt Arans; Wales its Island of Twenty Thousand Saints. And what has England got? The isles of Canvey, Sheppey, Wight and Dogs, Mersea, Brownsea, Foulness and Rat. But there are also wilder,…
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Hardback | Pub: 06 May 2021£16.99After Highland shepherd Colvin Munro disappears, a mysterious trail of his possessions is found in the Cairngorm mountains. Writing the eulogy for his memorial years later, his foundling-sister Mo seeks to discover why he vanished. Younger brother…
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Paperback | Pub: 06 May 2021£9.99In a life stranger than any fiction, Grace O’Malley, daughter of a clan chief in the far west of Ireland, went from marriage at fifteen to piracy on the high seas. She soon had a fleet of galleys under her commander, but her three decades of…
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Paperback | Pub: 06 May 2021£9.99After giving up a hectic life as a journalist in Europe and Hollywood in the late 1960s to return to his boyhood love of nature, Mike Tomkies moved to Eilean Shona, a remote island off the west coast of Scotland. There he rebuilt an abandoned croft…
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Paperback | Pub: 06 May 2021£16.99Arnold Schwarzenegger – a bodybuilder-turned-real-estate mogul who turned an undefeated streak at the Mr Olympia contest into an astonishing film career and eight years as the governor of California – is, for many people, the embodiment of the…
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Paperback | Pub: 06 May 2021£17.99Owners of the Ninth Wave Restaurant on the Isle of Mull, Carla and John Lamont, have brought fine dining to one of the most beautiful islands in the Hebrides. Their cooking is based on seasonality – using the wonderful natural larder of…
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Paperback | Pub: 06 May 2021£5.99Whether resident or tourist, no-one is spared from the bloodlust of Scotland’s most savage insect . . . The midge does not like sunlight and thrives in the wet, so the Scottish summertime brings perfect climatic conditions for this ruthless wee…
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Paperback | Pub: 06 May 2021£14.99The destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in December 1988 was the largest attack on Britain since World War Two. 259 passengers and 11 townsfolk of Lockerbie were murdered. Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was convicted…
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Paperback | Pub: 01 Apr 2021£8.99Longlisted for the Highland Book Prize 2019 When Les and Chris Humphreys moved to Ardnamurchan 15 years ago, little did they realise they would be sharing their home with some of Britain’s most elusive and misunderstood mustelids. Amongst all the…
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Paperback | Pub: 01 Apr 2021£4.99Brunch should evoke a sense of pleasure and relaxation – and perhaps also the temptation to try something new. Food writer and broadcaster Ghillie Basan offers 50 recipes in seven themed sections: brunch in a bowl, brunch with eggs, brunch on…
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Paperback | Pub: 01 Apr 2021£9.99‘Hauntingly delicious’ – Sunday Post Bitterhall is a story of obsession told between three unreliable narrators. Daniel, Órla and Tom share a flat and narrate the intersections of their lives, from future-world 3D printing…
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Paperback | Pub: 01 Apr 2021£16.99‘one of the year’s most exciting releases’ – The Herald China is building the world’s first digital totalitarian state, a system of hitherto unimaginable social and political control. Internet freedom has been eliminated and…
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Paperback | Pub: 01 Apr 2021£9.99When Mike Tomkies moved to a remote cottage on the shores of Loch Shiel in the West Highlands of Scotland, he found a place which was to provide him with the most profound wilderness experience of his life. Accessible only by boat, the cottage he…
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Paperback | Pub: 01 Apr 2021£6.99Customs play an important part in all societies and offer fascinating insights into a country’s history and culture. Scotland boasts a multitude of unique customs, many of which can be traced back to the times of the Druids, Celts and Romans. This…
Current Bestsellers
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Paperback | Pub: 14 Jan 2021£7.99THE JURA EDITION with new introduction by Alex Massie ‘For him Jura was home’ – Richard Blair on his father George Orwell ‘The book of the twentieth century . . . haunts us with an ever-darker relevance’ – Ben…
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Paperback | Pub: 01 Apr 2021£9.99
‘Hauntingly delicious’ – Sunday Post Bitterhall is a story of obsession told between three unreliable narrators. Daniel, Órla and Tom share a flat and narrate the intersections of their lives, from future-world 3D printing…
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Paperback | Pub: 04 Jun 2020£8.99Voted Culture NL’s Book of the Year for 2020 Teenager Alison Doig disappeared from Kinloch over thirty years ago under mysterious circumstances. Her reclusive family still live in a remote part of the Kintyre peninsula, amidst rumours of…
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Paperback | Pub: 05 Apr 2018£8.99No bicycle repair was ever made easier by turning your bike upside down. White shorts are for other people. A helmet perched on the back of your head is perfect if you ride your bike backwards – These and a host of other handy pointers jostle…
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Paperback | Pub: 01 Apr 2021£16.99
‘one of the year’s most exciting releases’ – The Herald China is building the world’s first digital totalitarian state, a system of hitherto unimaginable social and political control. Internet freedom has been eliminated and…
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Paperback | Pub: 11 Jun 2020£8.99Paul Stewart has returned to Scotland to continue his successful career. His agent and girlfriend, Gloria, has arranged for him to write The Philosophy of Food in Six Easy Chapters, a project he relishes but that will have to be delivered in six…
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Paperback | Pub: 15 Jul 2013£9.99£7.99During the first millennium AD the most northerly part of Britain evolved into the country known today as Scotland. The transition was a long process of social and political change driven by the ambitions of powerful warlords. At first these men…
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Paperback | Pub: 10 Sep 2020£14.99The collapse in January 2018 of the construction giant Carillion, outsourcer of huge Government building contracts, is one of the great financial scandals of modern times. When it folded it had only £29 million in the bank and debts and other…
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Hardback | Pub: 06 May 2021£16.99
After Highland shepherd Colvin Munro disappears, a mysterious trail of his possessions is found in the Cairngorm mountains. Writing the eulogy for his memorial years later, his foundling-sister Mo seeks to discover why he vanished. Younger brother…
Poem of the Week: ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers
11 May ’21
‘This sceptred isle’: Extract from Fringed with Mud and Pearls
11 May ’21
Espresso Martini from the Scottish Brunch Bible
11 May ’21
Escape into a Good Book – we can deliver right to your door
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Hardback | Pub: 01 Oct 2020£12.99LONDON, 1942. A killer going by the name of ‘Crimson Jack’ is stalking the wartime streets of London, murdering women on the exact dates of the infamous Jack the Ripper killings of 1888. Has the Ripper somehow returned from the grave? Is…
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Paperback | Pub: 27 Jun 2019£8.99First published in 1973 by the Hogarth Press, Magnus is George Mackay Brown’s tour de force – his most poetic and innovative book. He links the twelfth-century story of the saintly Earl Magnus of Orkney’s brutal murder at the hands of his…
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Hardback | Pub: 02 Apr 2020£20.00In April 1820, a series of dramatic events exploded around Glasgow, central Scotland and Ayrshire. Demanding political reform and better living and working conditions, 60,000 weavers and other workers went on strike. Revolution was in the air. It…
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Paperback | Pub: 14 May 2020£8.99You can’t change your past. You can only use the experiences you live through to make your future better, wiser. Anna and her best friend George meet every week to remember, to sigh, to laugh, to reminisce about their moments of glory, guilt and…
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Paperback | Pub: 06 Feb 2020£12.99£10.39Scotland’s history has been told many times, but never exclusively by its women. This book takes a unique perspective on dramatic national events as well as ordinary life, as experienced by women down the centuries. From the saintly but severe…
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Paperback | Pub: 15 Jul 2013
£9.99£7.99During the first millennium AD the most northerly part of Britain evolved into the country known today as Scotland. The transition was a long process of social and political change driven by the ambitions of powerful warlords. At first these men…
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Paperback | Pub: 06 Mar 2017£9.99
Hadrian’s Wall is the largest, most spectacular and one of the most enigmatic historical monument in Britain. Nothing else approaches its vast scale: a land wall running 73 miles from east to west and a sea wall stretching at least 26 miles down…
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Paperback | Pub: 04 Jul 2019£9.99Alone in his kayak, Brian Wilson sets off from the Solway Firth on a 2000-mile odyssey around Scotland’s extraordinarily varied coastline of cliffscapes, unspoiled shorelines, treacherous sea passages and beautiful Hebridean islands. Adventure is…
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Paperback | Pub: 10 Oct 2019£17.99Paul Murton has long had a love of the Viking north – the island groups of Orkney and Shetland and the old counties of Caithness and Sutherland – which, for centuries, were part of the Nordic world as depicted in the great classic the Orkneyinga…
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Paperback | Pub: 09 May 2019£14.99For a few brief months in 2007 and 2009, the Royal Bank of Scotland was the largest bank in the world. Then the Edinburgh-based giant – having rapidly grown its footprint to 55 countries and stretched its assets to £2.4 trillion under its…
