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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. To keep up to date with all our latest news, scroll down to sign up to the Birlinn newsletter.
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: 22 Jul 2021£9.99The brainchild of bestselling author Alexander McCall Smith, historian Alistair Moffat and artist Andrew Crummy, the Great Tapestry of Scotland is an outstanding celebration of thousands of years of Scottish history and achievement, from the end of…
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Hardback | Pub: 22 Jul 2021£30.00The Great Tapestry of Scotland is an outstanding celebration of thousands of years of Scottish history and achievement, from the end of the last Ice Age to Dolly the Sheep and Andy Murry’s Wimbledon victory of 2013. The 1000+ stitches spent a…
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Hardback | Pub: 15 Jul 2021£12.99Once upon a time in Botswana there was a little girl called Precious, who grew up to become a famous detective. But even as a young girl she had an extraordinary ability to solve mysteries. This volume contains all her first adventures, from the…
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Paperback | Pub: 15 Jul 2021£20.00Angus Watson’s Essential Gaelic-English and English-Gaelic dictionaries are well-established as one of the leading dictionaries of the Gaelic language. This combined dictionary is ideal for learners of Gaelic at all levels, and its generous…
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Calendar | Pub: 15 Jul 2021£9.99The Great Tapestry of Scotland is an outstanding celebration of 420 million years of Scottish history and achievement. Involving over a thousand volunteer stitchers who worked on 160 separate panels, the Tapestry is one of the biggest community arts…
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Paperback | Pub: 01 Jul 2021£14.99Polly Pullar has had a passion for red squirrels since childhood. As a wildlife rehabilitator, she knows the squirrel on a profoundly personal level and has hand-reared numerous litters of orphan kits, eventually returning them to the wild. In this…
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Paperback | Pub: 01 Jul 2021£6.99Pip lives on island and is the captain of his boat Puffin, which he sails to the mainland to collect the things that the islanders need. One beautiful morning Pip and his crew set off as usual, but when they reach the mainland they learn that the…
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Paperback | Pub: 01 Jul 2021£12.99The Outer Hebrides lie 40 miles to the west of mainland Scotland, forming a barrier to the North Atlantic. Culturally distinct from early prehistory, the islands contain a wealth of historical and archaeological monuments, including the standing…
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Paperback | Pub: 01 Jul 2021£6.99Bramble the cow lives on an old farm where she has lots of friends. But she has a problem – she hates loud noises! She doesn’t like the buzzing of bees, or the sound of the wind during a storm, or the farmer’s combine harvester. And she…
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Paperback | Pub: 01 Jul 2021£12.99Shortlisted for The Telegraph Sports Book Awards 2020 Biography of the Year ‘A splendid new biography. How good was young Tom Morris? Stephen Proctor makes his case cogently. Young Tom Morris was one of the greatest of them all’ –…
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Paperback | Pub: 01 Jul 2021£12.99On a hillside near Ballachulish in the Scottish Highlands in May 1752 a rider is assassinated by a gunman. The murdered man is Colin Campbell, a government agent travelling to nearby Duror where he’s evicting farm tenants to make way for his…
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Paperback | Pub: 01 Jul 2021£8.99June 1945. Hitler has triumphed, Britain is under German occupation and America cowers under the threat of nuclear attack. In the dead of night, a figure flits through the ruins of Dryburgh Abbey, searching for a hidden document he knows could…
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Paperback | Pub: 01 Jul 2021£8.99The Great Tapestry of Scotland is one of the most ambitious community arts projects ever undertaken. The brainchild of bestselling author Alexander McCall Smith, historian Alistair Moffat and artist Andrew Crummy, it was created by a team of over a…
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Paperback | Pub: 03 Jun 2021£12.99His name and image are everywhere – from Bank of Scotland fivers to the bizarre monument in Edinburgh’s city centre. Scott-land presumes that the reader will have only a hazy awareness of Sir Walter Scott, and, although Stuart Kelly will…
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Paperback | Pub: 03 Jun 2021£14.99Red kites were once Britain’s most common bird of prey. By the early 1900s they’d been wiped out in Scotland and England following centuries of ruthless persecution. When some reintroduced kites began roosting on their 1,400-acre farm at…
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Paperback | Pub: 03 Jun 2021£7.19In 2016 Scottish writer Iain Maloney and his Japanese wife Minori moved to a village in rural Japan. This is the story of his attempt to fit in, be accepted and fulfil his duties as a member of the community, despite being the only foreigner in the…
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Paperback | Pub: 03 Jun 2021£9.99In 1971 Alec Crawford is determined to make his fortune from ship salvage. Early attempts lead nowhere until he teams up with a new partner, Simon Martin. Diving in Hebridean waters, they explore remains of the Spanish Armada, and the wreck of the…
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Paperback | Pub: 03 Jun 2021£20.00Ian Hamilton Finlay’s garden in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh is widely regarded as one of the most significant gardens in Britain. In addition to being a spectacular example of garden design, it also features almost 300 artworks by Finlay…
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Hardback | Pub: 03 Jun 2021£100.00The legendary Scottish king Máel Coluim III, also known as ‘Malcolm Canmore’, is often held to epitomise Scotland’s ‘ancient Gaelic kings’. But Máel Coluim and his dynasty were in fact newcomers, and their legitimacy and status were far…
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Paperback | Pub: 03 Jun 2021£12.99Mairi Hedderwick embarks on a six-month-long journey to 40 islands from Arran to Lewis, recounting her pilgrimage around the archipelago of the Western Isles with which she has had a lifelong love affair. Filled with wit and wisdom that is matched…
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Paperback | Pub: 01 Jul 2021£8.99
June 1945. Hitler has triumphed, Britain is under German occupation and America cowers under the threat of nuclear attack. In the dead of night, a figure flits through the ruins of Dryburgh Abbey, searching for a hidden document he knows could…
Current Bestsellers
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Paperback | Pub: 03 Jun 2021£8.99A SUNDAY POST TOP PICK FOR SUMMER READING ‘This latest DCI Daley thriller is deftly plotted and peopled with sympathetically drawn local characters and satisfyingly nuanced local wrongdoers’ – Irish Independent When a light aircraft…
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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£9.99Shortlisted for the The Great Outdoors Awards – Outdoor Book of the Year 2020 Shortlisted for the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature 2020 There are strange relics hidden across Scotland’s landscape: forgotten places that are…
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Paperback | Pub: 03 Jun 2021£12.99
Mairi Hedderwick embarks on a six-month-long journey to 40 islands from Arran to Lewis, recounting her pilgrimage around the archipelago of the Western Isles with which she has had a lifelong love affair. Filled with wit and wisdom that is matched…
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Paperback | Pub: 03 Jun 2021£14.99
Red kites were once Britain’s most common bird of prey. By the early 1900s they’d been wiped out in Scotland and England following centuries of ruthless persecution. When some reintroduced kites began roosting on their 1,400-acre farm at…
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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…
Old Sins Cast a Long Shadow – Extract from A RATTLE OF BONES by Douglas Skelton
21 Jul ’21
National Picnic Month: Stash a Bottle of Elderflower Cordial in your Hamper
20 Jul ’21
Poem of the Week: Summer by Alexander McCall Smith
20 Jul ’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£12.99Scotland’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£12.99Hadrian’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…
