And the Land Lay Still

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When they sleep together one night in what must be an anteroom to Hell, Auld Nick presses his erection against Gideon's buttocks but is good enough to push no further.

Don, always trying to do the right thing, probably supplants Michael as the moral centre of the book, getting a just pay-off in a genuinely touching realisation of his undying love for English nurse Marjory Taylor. Luckenbooth is the type of novel that will transport you to another world and another time, one where seances, bone mermaids, and the spirit world are a reality. For The Testament of Gideon Mack, he introduced a framing device, footnotes, and a direct address to the reader – warning against hurrying through long novels, for example – which seems quite natural to readers of Alasdair Gray.For this is a book about the Central Belt, the bit in the middle bookended by Glasgow on the one side and Edinburgh on the other, the place not of deer and heather but of slag bings and state penitentiaries and holes in the ground that open up in the middle of the day. Like Michael in And the Land Lay Still, he was sent to school in Perthshire, in his case Glenalmond College, "a Scottish boarding school modelled on the English public school system", from which he emerged into the world of books (as did Massie, coincidentally; other old boys include Charles Falconer and Robbie Coltrane).

It is a hugely informative and justly popular book, bringing the unloved and largely untold story of devolution to a much larger audience. But Robertson’s historical ambition has its novelistic trade-off, and the book’ I've always felt that this much-vaunted political contrariness was about trying to reconcile immediate self-interest with the bigger picture. This is a glorious amalgam in that some parts are very funny indeed, and others are Robertson at his most polemical.Scotland's capital city was "not a centre but a blank", as the poet and critic Edwin Muir notoriously put it in the 1930s. eminently readable * Independent on Sunday * Both epic and domestic, it delivers a wonderful lifelikeness * Scotsman * A hugely ambitious and compassionate novel . They need it to deal with their women, their lives, their politics, to manage any kind of connection to each other at all. A chapbook he published himself a year ago contains "ballads, sangs, saws, poems", all composed in the older Scottish tongue. The novel was enjoyed by everyone in the group - which is no mean feat as there are usually lots of different opinions around the room and few books gain a unanimous accolade!