After reading The Blackhouse by Carole Johnstone, we were desperate for more to read that's set in the gorgeously moody country. We asked Carole for a few recommendations. Here’s what she suggests.
Get the full Page & Pairing guide to The Blackhouse here.
The Blackhouse
by Carole Johnstone
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg
I read The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg in high school. It’s like a nineteenth-century Dexter and is about as Highland Gothic as it gets!
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
by James Hogg
O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker
O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker was the only novel that she ever wrote, but it’s brilliant. A darkly humorous story about a doomed adolescent growing up in a drafty Scottish castle in the Highlands, it’s part coming-of-age story and part gothic murder-mystery.
O Caledonia
by Elspeth Barker
Raven Black by Ann Cleeves
There are many fantastic crime writers who use Scotland as a setting, but I always recommend Ann Cleeves’s brilliant Shetland series, featuring detective Jimmy Perez. My favorite is the very first in the series, Raven Black.
Raven Black: Book One of the Shetland Island Mysteries
by Ann Cleeves
Madam by Phoebe Wynne
Madam by Phoebe Wynne is a dark thriller wherein a teacher, Rose, starts to suspect that there is something very sinister going on in the remote girl’s boarding school where she works and lives. Eerie with feminist undertones, it’s a creepy read with vibes of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.
Madam
by Phoebe Wynne
The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks is an incredibly unsettling short novel about sixteen-year-old Frank, who lives with his father on a Scottish island. He has virtually no contact with the outside world. His life is full of rituals and strange predictions, and it is gradually revealed that he has murdered several people. I first read The Wasp Factory in my early twenties, and although I have never felt compelled to read it again, it still remains one of the most disturbing and unforgettable books I’ve ever read, and has become something of a Scottish cult classic.
The Wasp Factory
by Iain Banks
Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh, is, of course, another cult classic: set in ‘90s Edinburgh, it follows the squalid life and times of a group of heroin addicts, and was basically all anyone was reading or talking about when I was at university in Glasgow!
Trainspotting
by Irvine Welsh