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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

Southlight 29 is the previous print edition of Dumfries & Galloway’s very own literary magazine, which publishes the best of new poetry and short stories alongside black and white prints and...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Yarns to raise the pulse and thrill the spirit, inspired by the author of Kidnapped.

Buy one of our Book Bonds, large or small and - when “normal” service is resumed - we guarantee to s...

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...

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 ...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

Over the course of a year, leading historian and nature writer David Gange kayaked the weather-ravaged coasts of Atlantic Britain and Ireland from north to south: every cove, sound, inlet, islan...

Shaun Bythell owns The Bookshop, Wigtown - Scotland's largest second-hand bookshop. It contains 100,000 books, spread over a mile of shelving, with twisting corridors and roaring fires, and all ...

Shaun Bythell is the owner of The Bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland.

With more than a mile of shelving, real log fires in the shop and the sea lapping nearby, the shop should be an idyll for ...

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...

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...

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and an...

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...

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...

A bookshop love story Jessica Fox is living in Hollywood, a 26-year-old filmmaker with a high-stress job at NASA. Working late one night, craving another life, she is seized by a moment of inspi...

Following the Amber Route from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, C. J. Schüler charts the origins of amber, the myths and legends that have grown around it, and the dazzling artefacts crafted fro...

Uncovering the mystery of her mother’s disappearance as a child: Laura Cumming, prize-winning author and art critic, takes a closer look at her family story.

Autumn 1929 – a young girl is...

Named after John McNeillie, author of the classic work of Scottish rural realism, The Wigtown Ploughman, this is a collection of inspiring fiction and non-fiction from Scotland.

Buy one...

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...

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.

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...

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 ...

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 ...

Signed copies supplied.

This is a story about uncovering the things that really matter, and discovering wha...

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...

In A Thousand Ships, broadcaster and classicist Natalie Haynes retells the story of the Trojan War from an all-female perspective.

The devastating consequences of the fall of Troy stretch...

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 ...