Inhabiting a landscape, walking a landscape, writing a place and time For Linda Cracknell, exposure to wind, rock, mist, and salt water is integral to her writing process. She follows Susan Sontag’s advice to “Love words, agonise over sentences, and pay attention to the world,� observing and writing her landscapes from the particulars of each moment.  In this varied essay collection, Linda backpacks on a small island that is connected to the mainland only at low tide. In winter snow, she hikes the wooded hillside close to her home, a place she is intimately familiar with in all seasons. And she retraces over three days the steps of a trek made by her parents seven decades earlier. She explores her inspirations, in nature and from other artists and their work, and she offers thoughtful writing prompts.  Reading this collection will take you to new places, open your eyes to the world, and suggest ways to take note and make notes as you go—to inspire your own attentive looking, journaling, and writing practice. 

The paperback edition of The Other Side of Stone, a novella which centres around a Perthshire woollen mill, revisiting it over three centuries through characters as diverse as a 19th century stonemason and modern-day architect. The primary timeline follows Catharine, a cotton spinner from Paisley and fierce suffragette, who has followed her husband home to the village where he's taken on a job at the local mill. Both militant members of the Labour Movement, it is through her developing connection to the mill that the intricate interweaving of the other stories is revealed. While fictional, the novella draws on many real histories of local mills, and offers a fascinating insight into the long-term impact of industrialisation upon rural Scotland, as well as the struggle for women's rights.

'Luminous' The Times 'Beautiful' Caught by the River Bringing together contemporary Scottish writing on nature and landscape, this inspiring collection takes us from walking to wild swimming, from red deer to pigeons and wasps, from remote islands to back gardens, through prose, poetry and photography. Edited and introduced by Kathleen Jamie, and with contributions from Amy Liptrot, Jim Crumley, Chitra Ramaswamy, Malachy Tallack, Amanda Thomson and many more, Antlers of Water urges us to renegotiate our relationship with the more-than-human world, in writing which is by turns celebratory, radical and political.

Although mostly concealed, our bedrock geology profoundly determines what we see around us - not just our landforms, but the built environment too, from Aberdeen, often called the "granite city" to Bath, constructed from honey-coloured limestone- rocks shape the world around us. In Cornerstones, some of Britain's leading landscape and nature writers consider their relationship with the ground beneath their feet. Distinguished by a strong sense of place and close observation, these essays take the reader out into the landscape and convey the tactile heft, grain and rub of the rock, showing how it shapes our familiar landscapes. Adapted from the successful BBC Radio Three series, Cornerstones explores how different rock types give rise to their own distinct flora and fauna, and even affect the food we eat.

Short Circuit fills a real gap in the text book market. Written by 24 prizewinning writers and teachers of writing, this book is intensely practical. Each expert discusses necessary craft issues: their own writing processes, sharing tried and tested writing exercises and lists of published work they find inspirational. Endorsed by The National Association of Writers in Education, it became recommended or required reading for Creative Writing courses in the UK and beyond, including Goldsmiths, The University of Kent at Canterbury, Glasgow University, John Cabot University in Rome, Stockholm University in Sweden, Sussex University, Brighton University, Edge Hill University, Chichester University, The National University of Ireland in Galway, and University Campus Suffolk, at Ipswich.

'The Searching Glance' is the long-awaited second collection from one of Scotland's leading short story writers. The worlds inhabited by the characters in these stories are diverse - a hill walker is unknowingly watched over as he lies dying on a Highland hill; a Glasgow party-goer searches years later for a woman who may have mistaken him for a monster; a mysterious prize is sought in the perpetual daylight of midsummer Orkney. Whether it is in a suburban garden or on the stark skyline of a Borders hill, the landscape and seasonal extremes provoke and unsettle.Linda Cracknell's stories are multi-layered and brooding with longing and loss, allowing the reader a 'searching glance' at characters' lives. With touches of the surreal and hard strokes of reality, these stories will linger in the mind.