The Polygon imprint publishes literary fiction and poetry, both classic and modern, by writers as highly acclaimed as Liz Lochhead, Agnes Owens, Norman MacCaig, Robin Jenkins, George Mackay Brown, Denzil Meyrick and the author of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, Alexander McCall Smith. High profile music journalists Stuart Cosgrove, Tom Doyle, Vic Galloway and Zoë Howe all publish non-fiction with Polygon.
What’s new?
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Hardback | Pub: 03 Sep 2020£17.99Miami, 1963. A young boy from Louisville, Kentucky, is on the path to becoming the greatest sportsman of all time. Cassius Clay is training in the 5th Street Gym for his heavyweight title clash against the formidable Sonny Liston. He is beginning to…
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Paperback | Pub: 03 Sep 2020£12.99A follow up to the immensely popular #UntitledOne and #UntitledTwo. This year’s anthology gives us more of the promising and established names in British poetry who have all shared the Neu! Reekie! bill. Many of the works are new, many are…
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Paperback | Pub: 03 Sep 2020£14.99This complete collection of Agnes Owens’ five novellas opens with ‘Like Birds in the Wilderness’, a portrait of brickie Mac. He’s a straightforward guy with a talent for laying bricks and a liking for the drink who decides to head to…
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Hardback | Pub: 13 Aug 2020£9.99Stories do not have to be long. In the space of a couple of sentences – or even a page or two – we may see the human heart exposed in a way that is more powerful than occurs in many much longer narratives. In Tiny Tales Alexander McCall Smith…
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Paperback | Pub: 13 Aug 2020£8.99£7.19Sarah Sutherland wanted to be an archaeologist but now she is struggling to cope with the demands of work and caring for her elderly father, who has his own secret troubles. Her fascination with the past still remains, and she feels a special…
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E-Book | Pub: 30 Jul 2020£1.49When Daniella Coulstoun, a claims assistant for a major insurance company, takes a call from a man who declares he will be dead within the hour, she dismisses him as a crank and doesn’t report the call. But when a dead body is found in the…
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Paperback | Pub: 02 Jul 2020£8.99£7.19‘Sweaty, seedy fun’ – Ian Rankin A CRIME READERS ASSOCIATION Read of the Month When Daniella Coulstoun’s estranged mother Effie dies in Spain under suspicious circumstances, she feels it’s her duty to fly out for the funeral. On…
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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: 04 Jun 2020£8.99£7.19Teenager 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 wrecking, smuggling and barbaric cruelty. Now rich…
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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: 07 May 2020£8.99In June 1940, the Channel Islands becomes the only part of Great Britain to be occupied by Hitler’s forces. Hedy Bercu, a young Jewish girl from Vienna who fled to Jersey two years earlier to escape the Anschluss, finds herself once more entrapped…
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Paperback | Pub: 23 Apr 2020£9.99A poem does not have to be famous to be cherished. The best-known poems of Robert Burns have been loved by countless people over the years, but there are other poems that may be largely unknown that will mean a great deal to the few who are familiar…
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Paperback | Pub: 02 Apr 2020£8.99The brutish John Gourlay is a merchant in the village of Barbie, envied and resented by the villagers because of his success, which is symbolised in his prestigious house with green shutters. He dominates and bullies his family, in particular his…
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Hardback | Pub: 02 Apr 2020£20.00The beginning of the new decade brings with it a celebration of one of Scotland’s most cherished poets, Scotland’s first modern Makar, Edwin Morgan. A son of Glasgow, the city’s first poet Laureate, Morgan wrote about the city he loved, the…
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Paperback | Pub: 02 Apr 2020£5.00
Introduced by Jackie Kay, this selection of poems include the famous ‘Strawberries’ and ‘One Cigarette’ and four from Morgan’s autobiographical sequence, Love and a Life – love in all its aspects.
Forthcoming
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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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Hardback | Pub: 01 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: 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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Hardback | Pub: 05 Nov 2020£16.99At 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£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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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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Paperback | Pub: 04 Feb 2021£8.99First published in 1969, An Orkney Tapestry, George Mackay Brown’s seminal work, is a unique look at Orkney through the eye of a poet. Originally commissioned by his publisher as an introduction to the Orkney Islands, Brown approached the…
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Paperback | Pub: 04 Feb 2021£8.99Across 110th Street is a hard-boiled action thriller set in the mean streets of Harlem in the last days of the 1960s. Heroin has a grip on uptown New York and war is breaking out between the law, big-time racketeers and ghetto factions. The book…
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Paperback | Pub: 16 Feb 2021£12.99James 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: 01 Apr 2021£6.99
Explore Edinburgh’s hidden music heritage, plus a few of its more tuneful tall tales, with this eye-opening guide of the city’s music milestones, famous gigs, infamous incidents and colourful characters. From folk to funk, pop to punk…
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Alexander McCall Smith
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Hardback | Pub: 25 Jul 2019£16.99
To everything there is a season and a time for every purpose; it is summer in Scotland Street (as it always is) and for the habitués of Edinburgh’s favourite street some extraordinary adventures lie in waiting. For the impossibly vain Bruce…
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Hardback | Pub: 09 May 2019£14.99Paul 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: 23 Apr 2020£9.99
A poem does not have to be famous to be cherished. The best-known poems of Robert Burns have been loved by countless people over the years, but there are other poems that may be largely unknown that will mean a great deal to the few who are familiar…
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Hardback | Pub: 02 Nov 2017£14.99Val was working as a land girl when the Americans arrived at the nearby airfield in 1944. Mike, a young American airman, came into her life soon after, and so too did Peter Woodhouse, a dog badly treated on a neighbouring farm and taken in by her…
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Denzil Meyrick
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Hardback | Pub: 01 Oct 2020£9.99
It’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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E-Book | Pub: 04 Jun 2020£4.99Teenager 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 wrecking, smuggling and barbaric cruelty. Now rich…
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Paperback | Pub: 04 Jun 2020
£8.99£7.19Teenager 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 wrecking, smuggling and barbaric cruelty. Now rich…
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Paperback | Pub: 11 Jul 2019£8.99
LONGLISTED FOR THE MCILVANNEY PRIZE 2019 From the pen of the biggest selling crime writer published in Scotland… When the luxury cruiser, hastily renamed Great Britain, berths in Kinloch harbour, the pressure is on DCI Jim Daley. The UK…
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Paperback | Pub: 06 Sep 2018£8.99One of the Scotsman‘s Books of 2018 When Professor Francombe and her team of archaeologists find the remains of three women on a remote Kintyre hillside – a site rumoured to have been the base of Viking warlord Somerled – their delight…
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Paperback | Pub: 14 Sep 2017£8.99Bringing together six short stories – two of which are previously unpublished – One Last Dram Before Midnight is the perfect Christmas gift for fans of Denzil Meyrick. These tales take us from Jim Daley’s early days pounding the beat in…
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Paperback | Pub: 20 Mar 2017£8.99As the Second World War nears its end, a man is stabbed to death on the shoreline of Kinloch, in the shadow of the great warships in the harbour. Many years later, the postman on Gairsay, a tiny island off the coast of Kintyre, discovers that the…
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E-Book | Pub: 01 Jun 2016£0.99It’s July 1968, and redoubtable fishing-boat skipper Sandy Hoynes has his daughter’s wedding to pay for – but where are all the fish? He and the crew of the Girl Maggie come to the conclusion that a new-fangled supersonic jet which…
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Paperback | Pub: 23 Mar 2016£8.99
It’s December, and the Shannon family are returning home to their clifftop mansion near Kinloch for their annual AGM. Shannon International is one of the world’s biggest private companies, with tendrils reaching around the globe in…
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Paperback | Pub: 27 Apr 2015£8.99
When a senior Edinburgh Civil Servant spectacularly takes his own life in Kinloch Harbour, D.C.I. Jim Daley comes face-to-face with the murky world of politics. To add to his woes, two local drug dealers lie dead, ritually assassinated. It’s…
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E-Book | Pub: 12 Feb 2015£3.99D.C.I. Jim Daley is sent from the city to investigate a murder after the body of a woman is washed up on an idyllic beach on the West Coast of Scotland. Far away from urban resources, he finds himself a stranger in a close-knit community. Love,…
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Paperback | Pub: 29 Jan 2015£8.99D.C.I. Jim Daley is sent from the city to investigate a murder after the body of a woman is washed up on an idyllic beach on the West Coast of Scotland. Far away from urban resources, he finds himself a stranger in a close-knit community. Love,…
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E-Book | Pub: 27 Nov 2014£0.99When a body is found in a whisky barrel, buried on Dalintober beach, it appears that a notorious local crime, committed over a century ago, has finally been solved. D.C.I. Daley discovers that, despite the passage of time, the legacy of the murder…
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E-Book | Pub: 03 Jul 2014£4.99James Machie was a man with a genius for violence, his criminal empire spreading beyond Glasgow into the UK and mainland Europe. Fortunately, James Machie is dead, assassinated in the back of a prison ambulance following his trial and conviction….
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Paperback | Pub: 17 Jun 2014£8.99James Machie was a man with a genius for violence, his criminal empire spreading beyond Glasgow into the UK and mainland Europe. Fortunately, James Machie is dead, assassinated in the back of a prison ambulance following his trial and conviction….
Music – With the power to move the soul
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Paperback | Pub: 09 May 2019£9.99In August 1970 Elton John achieved overnight fame after a rousing performance at the Troubadour in Los Angeles; over the next five years he was unstoppable, scoring seven consecutive number 1 albums and sixteen Top 10 singles in America. But behind…
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Paperback | Pub: 03 Oct 2016£9.99Detroit 67 is the story of Motor City in the year that changed everything. Twelve chapters take you on a turbulent year-long journey through the drama and chaos that ripped through the city in 1967 and tore it apart in personal, political and…
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Paperback | Pub: 12 Apr 2018£9.99WINNER OF THE PENDERYN MUSIC BOOK PRIZE 2018 In the 1950s and 1960s, Memphis, Tennessee, was the launch pad of musical pioneers such as Aretha Franklin, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Al Green and Isaac Hayes, and by 1968 was a city synonymous with…
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Paperback | Pub: 11 Apr 2019£9.99In 1969, among Harlem’s Rabelaisian cast of characters are bandleader King Curtis, soul singers Aretha Franklin and Donny Hathaway, and drug peddler Jimmy ‘Goldfinger’ Terrell. In February a raid on tenements across New York leads to the…
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Paperback | Pub: 07 Nov 2019£9.99This is the story of the last acrimonious days of the Beatles, a final chapter reconstructing for the first time the seismic events of 1969, the year that saw the band reach new highs of musical creativity and new lows of internal strife. Two years…
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Hardback | Pub: 10 Oct 2019£16.99
A Whole Scene Going On covers Barry Fantoni’s working – and sometimes not working – life from his first sell-out one-man show in 1963 through his time at Private Eye and the creativity of the Sixties to 1968 when the decade of pop and…
