In twenty years behind the till in The Bookshop, Wigtown, Shaun Bythell has met pretty much every kind of customer there is - from the charming, erudite and deep-pocketed to the eccentric, flatu...

The Alastair Reid Pamphlet Prize 2020.

Claire Cox's poetry collection which won this category in the Wigtown Poetry Prize 2020, beautifully set by Gerry Cambridge.

Siberia's story is traditionally one of exiles, penal colonies and unmarked graves. Yet there is another tale to tell. Dotted throughout this remote land are pianos - grand instruments created d...

Our bones are the silent witnesses to the lives we lead. Our stories are marbled into their marrow. Drawing upon her years of research and a wealth of remarkable experience, th...

Desperate to connect with his native Galloway, Patrick Laurie plunges into work on his family farm in the hills of southwest Scotland. Investing in the oldest and most traditional breeds of Gall...

Who made modern Britain the country it is today? What does it mean to be the new Elizabethans?

Back in 1953 when the Queen ascended her throne, Britain was a ve...

‘It was never meant to be like this. Sabotage, yes. Propaganda, yes. All of that and more – but not this. Not murder.’

South Africa has become a powder keg. Its precious land is being sol...

Enter a grave new world of fascination and delight as award-winning writer Peter Ross uncovers the stories and glories of graveyards.

Who are London's outcast dead and why is David Bowie ...

From the widely renowned author Andrew O'Hagan, a heartbreaking novel of an extraordinary lifelong friendship. Everyone has a Tully Dawson: the friend who defines your life. In the summer of 198...

Witches occupy a clear place in contemporary imagination. We can see them, emerging shadowy, from the corners of the past: mad, glamorous, difficult, strange. They haunt the footnotes o...

Before David Wilson became the UK's pre-eminent criminologist, he was just a young boy growing up in the Scottish town of Carluke. As a child, the brutal murder of a young woman rocked this smal...

A complete collection of Scottish fairy tales, myths and legends, bound in a beautiful new edition. From the mysterious cat-faced lady whose magic allows a servant girl to attend a prince's ball...

Animals don't exist to teach us things, but that is what they have always done, and most of what they teach us is what we think we know about ourselves. From the bestselling author of H is for H...

The urgent, explosive story of Russia's espionage efforts against the West from the Cold War to the present - including their interference in the 2016 presidential election. Like a scene from a ...

Firths and estuaries are liminal places, where land meets sea and tides meet freshwater. Their unique ecosystems support a huge range of marine and other wildlife: human activity too is profound...

Sagasti narrates for us a thousand and one stories centre around music that take the reader from Bach to Gould, from Gould to the Beatles, from Sergeant Pepper to the music that was played in Na...

The British Isles are remarkable for their extraordinary seabird life: spectacular gatherings of charismatic Arctic terns, elegant fulmars and stoic eiders, to name just a few. Often found in th...

Climate change is the greatest challenge to humankind today. While the coronavirus sheds a light on the vulnerability of our interconnected world, the effects of global warming will be permanent...

The first ever collection of contemporary Scottish writing on nature and landscape, Antlers of Water showcases the diversity and radicalism of new Scottish nature writing today. Edited, curated ...

Throughout history we have told ourselves stories to try and make sense of what it all means: our place in a small corner of one of billions of galaxies, at the end of billions of years of exist...

If there is one thing that most of us aspire to, it is, simply, to be happy. And yet attaining happiness has become, it appears, anything but simple.

Having stuff - The Latest, T...

Welcome to Iceland, a very small nation with a very large number (two hundred and sixty five) of (mostly) very small museums. Founded in the backyards of houses, begun as jokes or bets or memori...

Even if we don't believe that Jesus was the son of God, we tend to think he was a great moral teacher. But was he? And how closely do idealised values such as our love of the family, helping the...

As Governor of Galicia, SS Brigadefuhrer Otto Freiherr von Wachter presided over an authority on whose territory hundreds of thousands of Jews and Poles were killed, including the family of the ...

Would you like to buy a book as a gift, but don't know which one to choose? 

Why not give a Wigtown Festival Bookshop Gift ...

There are still wild places out there on our crowded planet.

Through a series of personal journeys, Dan Richards explores the appeal of far-flung outposts in mountains, tundra, forests, o...

Last Christmas I almost killed myself. Almost. I've had a lot of almosts.

Never gone from almost to deed. Don't think I ever will. But it was a bad almost.

Living Better is Alastai...

Three days before her fifty-first birthday, Clio Campbell – one-hit-wonder, political activist, life-long-love and one-night-stand – kills herself in her friend Ruth’s spare bedroom. And, as pra...

In his late thirties, Edward Parnell found himself trapped in the recurring nightmare of a family tragedy. For comfort, he turned to his bookshelves, back to the ghost stories that obsessed him ...

Miami, 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 ...

When Tamsin Calidas first arrives on a remote island in the Scottish Hebrides, it feels like coming home. Disenchanted by London, she and her husband left the city and high-flying careers to mov...

One of the central facts of human existence is that every society shares a set of beliefs and assumptions - a faith, an ideology, a religion - that goes far beyond the life of the individual.

The new season begins. The geese return… Selected as a BOOK OF THE YEAR by The Times.

The arrival of huge flocks of geese in the UK is one of the most evocative and powerful harbingers of...

Paul 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...

Everyone knows what happened to Alva's mother, all those years ago. But when dark forces begin to stir in Ormscaula, Alva has to face a very different future - and question everything she though...

From Frances Hardinge, the Costa Award-winning author of The Lie Tree comes Deeplight.

The gods of the Myriad were as real as the coastlines and currents, and as merciless as the winds an...

When Margo goes in search of her birth mother for the first time, she meets her aunt, Nikki, instead.

Margo learns that her mother, Susan, was a sex worker murdered soon after Margo's ado...

'I can't bear the thought of a world without Michael Longley, yet his poetry keeps hurtling towards that fact more and more urgently as it stretches in an unflinching way beyond comfort or certa...

Two women a week are killed by a spouse or partner. Every seven minutes a woman is raped. Now is the time for change.

Bestselling author of Invisible Women Helena Kennedy, one of...

Kevin Barry has been acclaimed as one of the world's most accomplished and gifted short-story writers.

In this third collection, That Old Country Music, we encounter a ragbag of ...

Loch Katrine waterworks, 1856. A Highland wilderness fast becoming an industrial wasteland. No place for a lady.

Isabel Aird is aghast when her husband is appointed doctor to an extraordi...

Seven years after her mother's death, Leonie Charlton is still gripped by memories of their fraught relationship. In May 2017, Leonie trekked through the Outer Hebrides in the company of a frien...

Discover this extraordinary lost classic of nature writing - a fable about wildness and the desire to escape - beautifully illustrated by beloved artist and The Lost Words creator Jackie Morris....

Celtic women, both 'ordinary' and 'extraordinary' have often been overlooked inr ecorded history, while their male counterparts hogged the limelight. Too often written by the victors, and writte...

A shocking, heart-rending and blisteringly funny account of what it's like to live with mental illness, by a powerful new comic voice. When Michelle Thomas suffered her first major depressive ep...

It's 1634 and Samuel Pipps, the world's greatest detective, is being transported from the Dutch East Indies to Amsterdam, where he is facing trial and execution for a crime he may, or m...

When Cy Bellman, American settler and widowed father of Bess, reads in the newspaper that huge ancient bones have been discovered in a Kentucky swamp, he leaves his small Pennsylvania farm and y...

Buried beneath layers of flesh, our hearts pump, our lungs inflate, our kidneys filter. These organs, and others, are essential to our survival but remain largely unknown to us. In Beneath the S...

Everything Passes, Everything Remains is a confluence of journeys, made by Chris Dolan, his friends, and writers (like Laurie Lee) before him. It’s a bit about cycling, a bit about walk...