The Birlinn imprint publishes Scottish and general UK interest books, from biography to history, military to politics, and Scottish Gaelic. The name comes from the old Norse word ‘birlinn’, meaning a long boat or small galley used especially in the Hebrides and West Highlands of Scotland in the Middle Ages
What’s new from Birlinn?
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Paperback | Pub: 07 Jan 2021£20.00£16.00In 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: 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£20.00£16.00Photography 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: 08 Oct 2020£20.00£16.00Longlisted 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…
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Paperback | Pub: 17 Sep 2020
£9.99£7.99Every debate about the Scottish constitution should include the topic of Scottish Home Rule, and if there is to be another referendum in Scotland then Home Rule should definitely be one of the options on the ballot paper. Home Rule is not widely…
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Paperback | Pub: 10 Sep 2020£14.99£11.99The 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: 03 Sep 2020£14.99£11.99In 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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Hardback | Pub: 03 Sep 2020
£25.00£20.00Firths and estuaries are liminal places, where land meets sea and tides meet freshwater. Their unique ecosystems support a huge range of marine and other wildlife: human activity too is profoundly influenced by their waters and shores. The Solway…
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Paperback | Pub: 13 Aug 2020£9.99£7.99Climate change is the greatest challenge to humankind today. While the coronavirus sheds a light on the vulnerability of our interconnected world, the effects of global warming will be permanent, indeed catastrophic, without a massive shift in…
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Paperback | Pub: 06 Aug 2020£12.99£10.39This is a new edition of the bestselling guide to this increasingly popular pursuit. Scotland has the best-maintained records and facilities of any country in the world for undertaking family research, and now that the National Records of Scotland…
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Paperback | Pub: 23 Jul 2020£8.99£7.19The ever-expanding world of whisky can be a daunting one, with a deluge of new brands, distilleries and literature on the subject making it all but impossible for the amateur whisky drinker to find their way. Blair Bowman provides a compact and…
Coming soon
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Paperback | Pub: 04 Feb 2021£12.99In the course of the past 45 years, Angus Roxburgh has translated Tolstoy, met four successive Russian presidents and been jinxed by a Siberian shaman. He has come under fire in war zones and been arrested by Chechen thugs. During the Cold War he…
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Paperback | Pub: 01 Mar 2021£9.99Shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for UK Nature Writing 2020 Desperate to connect with his native Galloway, Patrick Laurie plunges into work on his family farm in the hills of southwest Scotland. Investing in the oldest and most traditional…
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Paperback | Pub: 04 Mar 2021£12.99Vibrating with endeavours for Britain’s effort against the might of Nazi Germany, Clydebank was – in hindsight – an obvious target for the attentions of the Luftwaffe. When, on the evening of 13 March 1941, the authorities first detected…
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Paperback | Pub: 04 Mar 2021£8.99Stretching for almost 10,000 miles (including numerous islands), the coastline of Scotland is one of the most varied in the world, from beautiful sandy beaches and flower-laden machair to dramatic cliffs and sea stacks. In this book Eilidh Muldoon…
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Paperback | Pub: 04 Mar 2021£14.99Shortlisted for the Military History Matters Book of the Year Award, 2020 This is the first modern history for general readers of the entire Jacobite movement in Scotland, England and Ireland, from the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 that drove…
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Hardback | Pub: 18 Mar 2021£20.00In 1995 the National Trust for Scotland acquired Mar Lodge Estate in the heart of the Cairngorms. Home to over 5,000 species, this vast expanse of Caledonian woodlands, subarctic mountains, bogs, moors, roaring burns and frozen lochs could be a…
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Paperback | Pub: 01 Apr 2021£9.99When 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 animals and birds that visit their garden,…
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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£16.99China is building the world’s first digital totalitarian state, a system of hitherto unimaginable social and political control. Internet freedom has been eliminated and ubiquitous surveillance cameras employ the latest facial recognition…
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Paperback | Pub: 01 Apr 2021£12.99When 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…
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Paperback | Pub: 01 Apr 2021£6.99Proverbs, once described as ‘the wisdom of many and the wit of one’, offer unique insights the way of life and the social mores of past generations. This book features an introduction which explores the role of proverbs in Scottish culture and…
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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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Hardback | Pub: 06 May 2021£20.00Greece has its sun-soaked Cyclades and Dodecanese; Scotland its Northern Isles and rain-drenched Hebrides and Ireland the Arans and Skelligs. And what has England got? The isles of Canvey, Sheppey, Wight and Dogs, Mersea, Brownsea, Two Tree and…
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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…
We think you might like:
Alistair Moffat
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Paperback | Pub: 08 Nov 2019
£9.99£7.99In an epic narrative, sometimes moving, sometimes astonishing, always revealing, Moffat writes an entirely new history of Britain. Instead of the usual parade of the usual suspects – kings, queens, saints, warriors and the notorious – this is a…
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Paperback | Pub: 21 Sep 2017£14.99£11.99From the Ice Age to the recent Scottish Referendum, historian and author Alistair Moffat explores the history of the Scottish nation. As well as focusing on key moments in the nation’s history such as the Battle of Bannockburn and the Jacobite…
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Paperback | Pub: 06 Mar 2017
£9.99£7.99Hadrian’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: 20 Mar 2017£9.99£7.99History has always mattered to Scots, and rarely more so than now at the outset of a new century, with a new census appearing in 2011 and after more than ten years of a new parliament. An almost limitless archive of our history lies hidden inside…
