Polygon

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  • This Door of the Seas
    Hardback | Pub: 06 Aug 2026
    £12.00

    The Darien Venture was the singular event at the end of the seventeenth century that fundamentally altered Scotland’s future. ‘A powerfully clear account . . . Highly recommended for anyone interested in the colonial history of…

  • Crescendo
    Paperback | Pub: 04 Jun 2026
    £9.99

    A lost Hitchcock film. A deadly secret. It’s murder in Hollywood. Hollywood, 1959. When struggling mystery writer Bobby Burgoyne is hired by Alfred Hitchcock to work on the script for his new film Crescendo, he thinks his future success is…

  • The Last Gifts to the Dead
    Paperback | Pub: 03 Sep 2026
    £9.99

    The scales of justice are easily tipped . . . London, 1932. A brutal murder, a complex forensic investigation and a safe conviction – or so everyone thinks until D.C.I Mowbray hears the condemned man’s last words. Now he needs Dr Jack…

  • The Driving Seat
    Paperback | Pub: 02 Apr 2026
    £9.99

    Emma Propeller is trying to swerve the wreckage of her marriage. When her husband returns from rehab with a new lover, Emma bolts with her baby on a midnight train to a castle in the Scottish Highlands. A job as a live-in driver for a glamorous…

  • Get Closer
    Paperback | Pub: 05 Mar 2026
    £10.99

    In his latest collection, Ryan Van Winkle uses photographs to access themes of abandonment, generational incomprehension and the very notion of how we end up where we are. This collection is a poetic photo album. Through these poems, Van Winkle…

ABOUT POLYGON

The Polygon imprint publishes fiction, poetry, and literary non-fiction, by writers as highly acclaimed as Alexander McCall Smith, Jenni Fagan, Graeme Macrae Burnet, Val McDermid, Denise Mina, Denzil Meyrick, Alan Warner, Hannah Lavery, and many more. Polygon champions the greats of Scottish literature with reissues of modern classics by writers such as Muriel Spark, Agnes Owens, Norman MacCaig, and Liz Lochhead, as well as launching early-career authors such as Natalie Jayne Clark, Alessandra Thom and Chris Barkley who published their debut novels in 2025.

A finalist in the Small Press of the Year Award at the 2026 British Book Awards, and longlisted for the CWA CWA Best Crime and Mystery Publisher 2026, Polygon goes from strength to strength and many authors published by this imprint have enjoyed recent prize successes. The non-fiction account of the war in Ukraine, Night Train to Odesa by Jen Stout won the Highland Book Prize 2025, and was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize; Anamnesis by Iona Lee was awarded the Somerset Maugham Award; The Silent House of Sleep by Allan Gaw won the Bloody Scot Debut Prize; The Malt Whisky Murders by Natalie Jayne Clark was longlisted for the First Novel Dagger; Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet has been shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize; and Holy Boys by Andrés N. Ordorica has been shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize, just to name a few. Alexander McCall Smith, one of the world’s best-loved authors, was also Knighted for Services to Literature in 2024.

Today’s impressive Polygon list, grew from radical beginnings in the 1970s ­– a time of vibrant interest in Scotland’s place both at home and in global politics, renewed confidence in our voice and a keen ear for those of other nations – and continues in that vein today, pushing boundaries, giving voice, inspiring conversation. Students at the University of Edinburgh launched Polygon as a small book-publishing platform and gradually it grew in reputation and importance. It was bought in 2002 by Birlinn Ltd. Today’s Polygon books are published by a team rooted in Scotland, renowned for innovative and independent publishing, shouting out to the world. Through the decades, the aim has always been to publish the leading voices of the day and we are proud to have at the heart of our publishing the foremost writers in fiction, literary non-fiction, poetry, music and drama.

Forthcoming

  • The Heydrich Legacy
    Paperback | Pub: 01 Oct 2026
    £9.99

    The new World War II thriller from the author of The Berlin Gambit. In 1942 Police Chief Inspector Rolf Schneider is ordered by Adolf Hitler to investigate the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. During his investigation of Heydrich’s secret files…

  • The Isle of Good Karma
    Hardback | Pub: 01 Oct 2026
    £18.99

    As heard on BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime. It’s never too late to make a change. Single and approaching middle age, Maeve Macdonald feels she has reached a point at which, if she doesn’t do something drastic soon, life will have passed her by. And…

  • So Many Thoughts of Blood
    Paperback | Pub: 07 Jan 2027
    £9.99

    A mother’s love, a mother’s wrath . . . A night at the theatre for Dr Jack Cuthbert proves to be the beginning of a baffling backstage murder investigation. There is no doubt who the victim is – a star of the most prestigious West End stages…

  • The Green Isle of the Great Deep
    Paperback | Pub: 07 Jan 2027
    £9.99

    When young Art and Old Hector fall into a deep river pool while poaching salmon, they awaken in the Green Isle—the legendary Highland paradise of the afterlife. But the heaven they find is no paradise. It has been transformed into a sterile…

  • The Fall of Frankenstein
    Hardback | Pub: 04 Feb 2027
    £12.00

    Across the globe, language is being used to control and to harm; politicians wield it like a weapon. Far away, deep in a silent cave, the Creature awakens, and soon words begin to disappear from the world. Tired of being immortal Victor…

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  • To Pay the Ferryman
    Paperback | Pub: 06 Feb 2025
    £9.99

    A cold case in the city of the dead. D.I. Lomond is a devoted family man. A good detective. When the body of a young woman involved in the worlds of art and adult streaming is found in the River Clyde, Lomond believes there may be echoes of a cold…

  • The Other Side of Fear
    Paperback | Pub: 03 Jul 2025
    £9.99

    There are two sides to everything, and fear isn’t any different – sometimes you have to push through to the other side . . . Someone has big plans for Stoirm, and they’ll stop at nothing to get what they want. Investigative journalist Rebecca…

  • Whisky from Small Glasses
    Paperback | Pub: 29 Jan 2015
    £9.99

    Large measures, dark hearts. When the body of a young woman is washed up on an idyllic beach on the west coast of Scotland, D.C.I. Jim Daley is despatched from Glasgow to lead the investigation. Far from home, and his troubled marriage, it seems…

  • The Silent House of Sleep
    Paperback | Pub: 02 Jan 2025
    £9.99

    Winner of the Bloody Scotland Debut Prize Death is a lonely business . . .  No one who meets Dr Jack Cuthbert forgets him. Tall, urbane, brilliant but damaged, this Scottish pathologist who works with Scotland Yard is the best the new DCI has seen….

  • The Malt Whisky Murders
    Paperback | Pub: 05 Jun 2025
    £9.99

    Whisky is a bloody business . . . When a dilapidated distillery comes up for sale in rural Kintyre, Eilidh and her wife Morag jump at the chance. But their ambition to run the first women-owned whisky distillery in Scotland seems to be scuppered…