We wish you all a very Happy, Safe and Healthy New Year.
2021 opens with another lockdown for most of us and once again our thoughts are with booksellers right across the UK. All members of the Birlinn team are knuckling down and will endeavour to produce a remarkable, ballsy publication programme in the face of all of the restrictions faced. We are proud of our authors and hope you will enjoy their output in the months ahead. Keep an eye on our pages and social platforms for more information in the coming weeks.
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: 16 Feb 2021£14.99James Baldwin was born into the squalor of a Harlem tenement and transcended an early life of setbacks and racism. A storefront preacher at the age of fourteen, he supported his entire family – mother and eight siblings – before he began…
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Paperback | Pub: 04 Feb 2021£12.99In a career spanning forty years, Angus Roxburgh lived and worked in Russia as a literary translator, as Moscow correspondent of the Sunday Times and the BBC, and as a media consultant to the Kremlin. He witnessed Russian history unfolding at first…
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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: 07 Jan 2021£20.00In 1725 an extensive military road and bridge-building programme was implemented by the British crown that would transform 18th-century Scotland. Aimed at pacifying some of her more inaccessible regions and containing the Jacobite threat, General…
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Paperback | Pub: 07 Jan 2021£8.991947. In a damp, run-down farmhouse on the island of Jura, George Orwell is embarking on his greatest work: Nineteen Eighty-Four. Forty-four years old and suffering from the tuberculosis that will eventually take his life, this book is his legacy…
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E-Book | Pub: 17 Dec 2020£6.99‘A fabulous distillation of all the joy and bitterness, hurt and humour of an extraordinary man… I doubt there will be a better written, more interesting or important book published in Scotland this year’ – Daily…
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Book | Pub: 17 Nov 2020£35.00Give the perfect gift this holiday with our exclusive signed bundle from Alexander McCall Smith. In this set you will get 3 beautiful hardback editions for a specially discounted price, all signed by McCall Smith himself. Save £5+ and free…
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Hardback | Pub: 05 Nov 2020£9.99This beautifully-written memoir tells the story of the first part of a life lived between Scotland, England and three countries half a world away: Burma, as it then was, India and Pakistan. Having been born in Burma, Neil Swan spent his early years…
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Hardback | Pub: 05 Nov 2020£17.99At the bottom of a sharply descending street – in the topographical sense – in Edinburgh’s Georgian New Town, new residents have moved in to number 44 Scotland Street, joining the already well-known and much-loved denizens of that remarkable…
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Paperback | Pub: 05 Nov 2020£4.99£3.99The Arbroath Smokie is one of Scotland’s best loved traditional fish delicacies, taking its name from the small coastal town in the county of Angus it has been on the menu for a thousand years. Unlike its famous fishy relatives, Finnan Haddies…
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Paperback | Pub: 05 Nov 2020£20.00Photography was crucial for E. A. Hornel (1864–1933). From 1891 to the end of his career, he built up an extensive photographic collection that was key in making him a successful painter. By analysing this collection, we can examine his ways of…
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Hardback | Pub: 05 Nov 2020£25.00When Jacobite enthusiast Michael Nevin successfully bid for a handwritten letter and memorandum by Bonnie Prince Charlie at an auction, little did he realise he had come into possession of material that would change our view of history. Written in…
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Paperback | Pub: 05 Nov 2020£12.99Gathered in this book are over twenty islands that have decidedly human origins, whether they are the products of imagination, deception or simply human error. They are phantoms, fakes and legends: an archipelago of ex-isles and forgotten…
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Hardback | Pub: 15 Oct 2020£12.99What really counts in this life? For the writer, Alexander McCall Smith, it is friendship and love – themes that crop up time and again in his novels. And it is these themes that he explores in this collection of poems. In this book, divided into…
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Hardback | Pub: 08 Oct 2020£20.00Longlisted for The Highland Book Prize 2020 Fourteen centuries ago, Irish saints brought the Word of God to the Hebrides and Scotland’s Atlantic shore. These ‘white martyrs’ sought solitude, remoteness, even harshness, in places apart from the…
Current Bestsellers
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Hardback | Pub: 01 Oct 2020£9.99It’s December 1967, and the town of Kinloch is cut off by heavy snow. With all roads closed, the only way to feed and water the townsfolk is for the fishing fleet to sail to Girvan for much needed supplies. But the skipper of the Girl Maggie,…
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Paperback | Pub: 14 Jan 2021£7.99
THE 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: 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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Hardback | Pub: 05 Nov 2020£17.99
At the bottom of a sharply descending street – in the topographical sense – in Edinburgh’s Georgian New Town, new residents have moved in to number 44 Scotland Street, joining the already well-known and much-loved denizens of that remarkable…
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Paperback | Pub: 16 Aug 2018£17.99This is the essential guide to the north of Scotland, on a route which begins in Inverness, weaves westwards to Applecross and then northwards towards Torridon. From Ullapool it leads to the most northerly points in Britain, passing by Caithness and…
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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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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: 27 Mar 2012£8.99
This is the intimate and revealing autobiography of Margaret Rhodes, the first cousin of Queen Elizabeth II and the niece of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. Margaret was born into the Scottish aristocracy, into a now almost vanished world of…
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Paperback | Pub: 16 Feb 2021£14.99
James Baldwin was born into the squalor of a Harlem tenement and transcended an early life of setbacks and racism. A storefront preacher at the age of fourteen, he supported his entire family – mother and eight siblings – before he began…
A Lesson the Value of Perseverance: NASA and the Stirling Engine
23 Feb ’21
How to Be the Perfect Romantic Poet by Liz Lochhead
23 Feb ’21
Easy Kale, Tomato and Cashew Nut Stir-up
22 Feb ’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£8.99
You 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£12.99Scotland’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£9.99During 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…
