Maybe it had just been a matter of time: had we had more time, what we would or could have achieved, together. Had we actually met that first time round, how different things might have been. The world we would have painted. Had we really loved each other, we would never have separated. It was a long hot summer… A chance encounter on a ferry leads to a lifetime of regret for misplaced opportunities. Beautifully written and vividly evoked, The Girl on the Ferryboat is a mirage of recollections looking back to the haze of one final prelapsarian summer on the Isle of Mull.

This selected works of Sorley MacLean brings together published poetry from MacLean's own edited volumes of Poetry. The poems will be given in their original Gaelic with English translations and introduced by Angus Peter Campbell and Aonghas Mac Neacail. Sorley MacLean was born on the island of Raasay in 1911. He was brought up within a family and community immersed in Gaelic language and culture, particularly song. He studied English at Edinburgh University from 1929, taking a first-class honours degree. Despite this influence, he eventually adopted Gaelic as the medium most appropriate for his poetry. He translated much of his own work into English, opening it up to a wider public. He fought in North Africa during World War II, before taking up a career in teaching, holding posts on Mull, in Edinburgh and finally as Head Teacher at Plockton High School. Amongst other awards and honours, he received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1990. He died in 1996 at the age of 85.

'In pencil-written and drawing-spattered notebooks intended for her Australian granddaughter, an elderly woman, now in Edinburgh, remembers and relives her Hebridean childhood. The community thus recreated is one where modernity - its emblem the Electricity of Angus Peter Campbell's title - collides and overlaps with all sorts of linguistic, cultural and other continuities. But this is no sentimental or elegiac excursion into a long-gone past. What's evoked here is a powerful sense of what it was, and is, to grow up amid family, neighbours and surroundings of a sort providing, for the most part, both security and happiness.' JAMES HUNTER

WINNER OF THE 2017 SALTIRE SOCIETY FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD A face is nothing without its history. Gavin and Emma live in Manhattan. She's a musician. He works in Artificial Intelligence. He's good at his job. Scarily good. He's researching human features to make more realistic mask-bots - non-human 'carers' for elderly people. When his enquiry turns personal he's forced to ask whether his own life is an artificial mask. Delving into family stories and his roots in the Highlands of Scotland, he embarks on a quest to discover his own true face, 'uniquely sprung from all the faces that had been'. He returns to England to look after his Grampa. Travels. Reads old documents. Visits ruins. Borrows, plagiarises and invents. But when Emma tells him his proper work is to make a story out of glass and steel, not memory and straw, which path will he choose? What's the best story he can give her? A novel about the struggle for freedom and personal identity; what it means to be human. It fuses the glass and steel of our increasingly controlled algorithmic world with the memory and straw of our forebears' world controlled by traditions and taboos, the seasons and the elements.

Archie has lived on a small island off the Scottish coast his entire life. After decades without a job and without a break from his selfish wife, Archie packs his bag and leaves to find the hole where the North Wind originates, as the old stories claim. He meets many strange and wonderful characters along the way, including the beautiful deaf Jewel, Yukon Joe and Sergio the expert potato-peeler. Seeking to find his way in the world, and driven by the ancient stories he grew up with on the island, Archie faces many dangers in his quest for knowledge.

Fifty-nine new poems from award-winning writer Angus Peter Campbell. These poignant and beautifully crafted poems were originally created while in residence in a thatched house in his native South Uist. They move across time and space like a radio dial between global stations, sometimes catching the indigenous, sometimes the marvellous and comic. Poems that celebrate the places and voices located somewhere between Luxembourg and Lyons. 

A face is nothing without its history. Gavin and Emma live in Manhattan. She’s a musician. He works in Artificial Intelligence. He’s good at his job. Scarily good. He’s researching human features to make more realistic mask-bots – non-human ‘carers’ for elderly people. When his enquiry turns personal he’s forced to ask whether his own life is an artificial mask. Delving into family stories and his roots in the Highlands of Scotland, he embarks on a quest to discover his own true face, ‘uniquely sprung from all the faces that had been’. He returns to England to look after his Grampa. Travels. Reads old documents. Visits ruins. Borrows, plagiarises and invents. But when Emma tells him his proper work is to make a story out of glass and steel, not memory and straw, which path will he choose? What’s the best story he can give her? A novel about the struggle for freedom and personal identity; what it means to be human. It fuses the glass and steel of our increasingly controlled algorithmic world with the memory and straw of our forebears’ world controlled by traditions and taboos, the seasons and the elements.

Nearly 10,000 young people in Scotland are homeless. Some we see on the streets, thousands more are 'hidden' - sofa surfing, in B&Bs and living in unsafe homes. Every one of them has their own story to tell. For 30 years Rock Trust has been listening to their stories and helping them find a home. In All the Way Home, some of Scotland's leading authors have come together with young people to mark this anniversary of Rock Trust's urgent, ongoing work. Across first-hand accounts, poetry and fiction, this anthology brings to life the visible and invisible realities of home and homelessness, of family and belonging.

Maybe it had just been a matter of time: had we had more time, what we would or could have achieved, together. Had we actually met that first time round, how different things might have been. The world we would have painted. Had we really loved each other, we would never have separated. It was a long hot summer… A chance encounter on a ferry leads to a lifetime of regret for misplaced opportunities. Beautifully written and vividly evoked, The Girl on the Ferryboat is a mirage of recollections looking back to the haze of one final prelapsarian summer on the Isle of Mull.

George Orwell's timeless novel Animal Farm, one of Time magazine's 100 best English-language novels of all time, has been translated by Aonghas Padraig Caimbeul into Gaelic for the very first time. When the animals of Manor Farm revolt and take control from Mr Jones, they have hopes for a life of freedom and equality. However, when the pigs Napoleon and Snowball rise to power, the other animals discover that they may not be as equal as they had once thought. A tragic political allegory described by Orwell as being 'the history of a revolution that went wrong', this book is as relevant now - if not more so - as it was when it was first written.