Scottish By Inclination

'Gradually I forgot I was a foreigner.' Barbara Henderson has been Scottish by inclination for 30 years. She fell in love with Scotland and its people when she left Germany at the age of 19. Now a children's author, storyteller and teacher in the Highlands, she gives us a lively glimpse of Scotland through the eyes of an EU immigrant – from her first ceilidh to Brexit and the choppy seas of citizenship. Scottish by Inclination also celebrates the varied contributions of 30 remarkable Europeans – beer brewers, entrepreneurs, academics, artists and activists – who have chosen to call Scotland home. 'All voices matter and deserve to belong. Belonging is more than a privilege. Belonging, I am now convinced, can be a choice.'

Living your life against the odds.Through the voices of Malawians The Spirit of Malawi is a first-hand account of daily life in Malawi. It also examines the big issues that affect us all, but Malawians more than most: climate change, the global economic divide and digitalisation. It looks beyond the clichés to consider what life is really like for 18 million people born into a national economy less than a quarter of the size of Edinburgh's.

Reveals the dynamics and rise in prominence of Scottish public opinion in a period of religious and constitutional tension.

Shortlisted for the The Great Outdoors Awards – Outdoor Book of the Year 2020 Shortlisted for the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature 2020 There are strange relics hidden across Scotland's landscape: forgotten places that are touchstones to incredible stories and past lives which still resonate today. Yet why are so many of these 'wild histories' unnoticed and overlooked? And what can they tell us about our own modern identity? From the high mountain passes of an ancient droving route to a desolate moorland graveyard, from uninhabited post-industrial islands and Clearance villages to caves explored by early climbers and the mysterious strongholds of Christian missionaries, Patrick Baker makes a series of journeys on foot and by paddle. Along the way, he encounters Neolithic settlements, bizarre World War Two structures, evidence of illicit whisky production, sacred wells and Viking burial grounds. Combining a rich fusion of travelogue and historical narrative, he threads themes of geology, natural and social history, literature, and industry from the places he visits, discovering connections between people and place more powerful than can be imagined.

Tired of the pace and noise of life near London and longing for a better place to raise their young children, Mary J. MacLeod and her husband encountered their dream while vacationing on a remote island in the Scottish Hebrides. Enthralled by its windswept beauty, they soon were the proud owners of a near-derelict croft house—a farmer’s stone cottage—on “a small acre” of land. Mary assumed duties as the island’s district nurse. Call the Nurse is her account of the enchanted years she and her family spent there, coming to know its folk as both patients and friends. In anecdotes that are by turns funny, sad, moving, and tragic, she recalls them all, the crofters and their laird, the boatmen and tradesmen, young lovers and forbidding churchmen. Against the old-fashioned island culture and the grandeur of mountain and sea unfold indelible stories: a young woman carried through snow for airlift to the hospital; a rescue by boat; the marriage of a gentle giant and the island beauty; a ghostly encounter; the shocking discovery of a woman in chains; the flames of a heather fire at night; an unexploded bomb from World War II; and the joyful, tipsy celebration of a ceilidh. Gaelic fortitude meets a nurse’s compassion in these wonderful true stories from rural Scotland.