Polygon Books

A young disabled girl is lost on a winter's night in Leith, unable to help herself or find her way home. Someone is combing the streets, frantically searching for her. Within hours of her disappearance, a body is washed up on Beamer Rock, a tiny island in the Forth being used as part of the foundations for the new Queensferry bridge. No sooner has Detective Inspector Alice Rice discovered the identity of that body than another one is washed up on the edge of the estuary, in Belhaven Bay. What is the connection between the two bodies? Is another victim in the killer's sight and if so, can Alice solve the puzzle before another life is taken? In this novel, the sixth in the Alice Rice Mystery series, appearances belie reality, and truths and falsehoods become indistinguishable.

"One of the greatest pieces of fiction to come out of Britain in the 80’s... Butlin’s book is a stylistic triumph." Irvine Welsh

Morris Magellan has a house in the suburbs, nice wife and kids. But Morris is also a chronic alcoholic, heading fast towards self-destruction. Morris is not hoping to meet Ms. Right and acquire the two kids that will straighten everything out. He already has all this and it hasn’t kept him off the bottle.

Ron Butlin’s tale of one man’s inner turmoil is haunting, harrowing, yet strangely uplifting; a masterpiece from a neglected Scottish writer.

How do you start a new life when the person you love is about to die?At the age of thirty-six, Gordon Darroch’s wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was a devastating blow just as he, and their two children with autism, were preparing to move to her native Holland. Eighteen months later, as their plans seemed to be back on course, came the second blow: Magteld was terminally ill and possibly had only a few months to live. As her health rapidly deteriorated, they became caught up in a race against time to get a dying mother home and give their children a future in a country they hardly knew. How could they build a new life in the midst of grief and loss? How would their two sons adjust to such enormous changes? And what would remain of Magteld once she was gone? All the Time We Thought We Had is a story of love and loss and a meditation on grief and memory. It's about how events shape our lives and how we cope with them. And it raises important questions about what we value in life and the legacies we leave behind.

Two British travellers, Donald Kemp and Margaret Duncan, have disappeared in the wild mountainous region of northern Afghanistan; a terrain into which western Europeans seldom penetrate. The authorities in Kabul say that they have been murdered by the inhabitants of a small and primitive village and that retribution has already been exacted in the form of wholesale reprisals. John McLeod, a friend of the missing couple who has spent some years in Afghanistan as a diplomat, is deeply suspicious of these explanations. He returns to Kabul and starts his own enquiries, but everywhere he is met with obstruction and evasion, though McLeod is deterred neither by the devious courtesies of local officials nor by the discreet negations of his own embassy. The quest becomes an obsession in which physical pursuit is linked with a personal desire to discover the truth of Donald and Margaret's whole strange relationship.

Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut' — Ernest Hemingway Over a boozy Sunday lunch, flatmates James Adair and Ben Stenning made a promise to row across the ocean. At first they considered the Pacific, then the Atlantic, but once James Cracknell and Ben Fogle completed the high-profile Atlantic Rowing Race, their thoughts turned to the Indian Ocean, longer and tougher than the Atlantic and having seen fewer people row across its waters than have walked on the Moon. After years of planning and fund raising, they were ready to launch in Spring 2011. Neither James nor Ben had any rowing or sailing experience. To add to this, James had contracted Guillain-Barre syndrome at the age of 14, which had locked his body into total paralysis for three months (while his mind had remained completely active) and which had left him with paralysed feet. This was a challenge that neither man should have ever considered.

As elegant and witty as it is disturbing.' — The Daily Telegraph 'Accomplished and gloriously black comedy' — Allan Guthrie 'Lovely, sparse, elegant writing, highly original plot and ever— building tension make this book irresistible. There's sex and drugs and rock-and-roll, a whiff of true evil and a scream-out loud finale. Wow!' — Australian Women's Weekly 'Scary and stylish slice of urban noir' — Boyd Tonkin, Independent 'Colourful characters, dramatic plot twists and vibrant vernacular … a great read' The Bookseller 'Brilliant, shocking and unputdownable' — Sydney Morning Herald Bronny, a young Australian, finds herself down and out in London. She's a sweet girl who has spent her teenage years in a fearful, cautious bubble. She's never taken drugs, had sex or killed anyone. Within six weeks she's done all three. A group of backpackers break into an abandoned London townhouse seeking a rent-free life of debauchery. They don't realise someone's already there: a terrified woman bound and gagged in the basement. “The Devil's Staircase” combines a chick-lit voice and a dark crime noir environment. Not for the faint-hearted, “The Devil's Staircase” is funny, sexy and disturbing — it will keep you on the edge of your seat from start to finish.

By the Women's Prize longlisted author of The Others.
Vanish to a different land with Sissy Olikara. Sissy is twelve years old, living with her parents and baby brother on a school campus outside Lusaka. It is 1978, and the political situation in Zambia is becoming volatile. The family enjoy a gentle life until, suddenly, Sissy's father leaves and returns to India.
His departure brings about a chain of events which force Sissy into the adult world and have profound, long-lasting consequences.
Moving back and forth in time as the adult Sissy reflects on her childhood, The Wild Wind is a haunting, absorbing coming-of-age tale of lost loves and lost innocence — one that takes readers on a journey into a young woman's past and its repercussions on her future.
Featured on the Guardian's 'NOT THE BOOKER LONGLIST, 2019'
(https://www.theguardian.com/books/series/not-the-booker-prize)

This book is an intimate, fond and funny memoir of one of the greatest novelists of the last century. This colourful, personal, anecdotal, indiscreet and admiring memoir charts the course of Muriel Spark's life revealing her as she really was. Once, she commented sitting over a glass of chianti at the kitchen table, that she was upset that the academic whom she had appointed her official biographer did not appear to think that she had ever cracked a joke in her life. Alan Taylor here sets the record straight about this and many other things.
With sources ranging from notebooks kept from his very first encounter with Muriel and the hundreds of letters they exchanged over the years, this is an invaluable portrait of one of Edinburgh's premiere novelists. The book was published to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Muriel's birth in 2018.

The Dead Queen of Bohemia is a journey through a life lived on the edge. With a poetic style influenced by Gertrude Stein and William Burroughs, this collection is woven with surrealistic imagery that is both unflinching and dislocating.
Fagan's poetry is raw and tough yet beautiful and tender and with themes of loss and recovery, hope and defiance, represents a clarion call from a self-taught poet who started writing at the age of seven and so far has not stopped. The Dead Queen of Bohemia documents the progression of a voice and a life written over the last twenty years. It opens with Jenni's most recent work and includes her previous two collections, both now out of print.

Vienna, 1711. Eleven years after the events of Secretum, and by means of a mysterious bequest, Atto Melani arranges for his faithful helper to relocate from a Roman slum to the imperial court in Vienna. Here, Atto enlists his help in a secret mission to bring about the end of the war between France and Austria. Meanwhile, a Turkish delegation has arrived in Vienna for talks with Emperor Joseph I, despite the fact that Austria is supposed to be at peace with the Ottoman Empire.
When the emperor suddenly falls ill with smallpox and students are targeted by a serial killer, fears grow that a centuries-old power struggle has been reignited. What can Atto and his helper do to prevent Europe from descending into all-out conflict?
An unfinished palace known as the Place with No Name, an exotic menagerie and a fantastical Flying Ship are just some of the ingredients of this baroque spy novel which will intrigue and delight fans of Monaldi and Sorti's series.

In 1969, among Harlem's Rabelaisian cast of characters are bandleader King Curtis, soul singers Aretha Franklin and Donny Hathaway, and drug peddler Jimmy 'Goldfinger' Terrell. In February a raid on tenements across New York leads to the arrest of 21 Black Panther party members and one of the most controversial trials of the era. In the summer Harlem plays host to Black Woodstock and concerts starring Sly and the Family Stone, Stevie Wonder and Nina Simone. The world's most famous guitarist, Jimi Hendrix, a major supporter of the Black Panthers, returns to Harlem in support of their cause.
By the end of the year Harlem is gripped by a heroin pandemic and the death of a 12-year-old child sends shockwaves through the USA, leaving Harlem stigmatised as an area ravaged by crime, gangsters and a darkly vengeful drug problem.

FULLY REVISED AND EDITED PAPERBACK EDITION
Shortlisted for Penderyn Music Prize
Detroit 67 is the story of Motor City in the year that changed everything. Twelve chapters take you on a turbulent year-long journey through the drama and chaos that ripped through the city in 1967 and tore it apart in personal, political and interracial disputes. It is the story of Motown, the break-up of The Supremes and the damaging disputes at the heart of the most successful African-American music label ever.
Set against a backdrop of urban riots, escalating war in Vietnam and police corruption, the book weaves its way through a year when soul music came of age and the underground counterculture flourished. LSD arrived in the city with hallucinogenic power and local guitar band MC5 — selfstyled holy barbarians of rock — went to war with mainstream America. A summer of street-level rebellion turned Detroit into one of the most notorious cities on earth, known for its unique creativity, its unpredictability and self-lacerating crime rates.
The year 1967 ended in social meltdown, rancour and intense legal warfare as the complex threads that held Detroit together finally unravelled.
Features the story of DETROIT, a major motion picture.

July, 1700, Rome. Atto Melani — once a celebrated castrato soprano, now a spy in the service of King Louis XIV, the Sun King — mingles with other high-ranking guests at the villa of Cardinal Spada. Despite being there to celebrate the Cardinal's nephew's wedding, the main topic of conversation is the grave illness of the Pope and the approaching demise of Charles II, King of Spain. Charles has no heir and Kaiser Leopold of Austria and King Louis are each demanding the throne, with the Vatican supposedly mediating.
Keen to promote his master's cause, Melani sets in motion a grandiose conspiracy that will plunge him into a world of secret languages, religious sects, forged Royal wills and Europe into war.

A “clever and highly entertaining” look at books through history that were stolen, went missing, or just never got written (The New York Times).In an age when deleted scenes from Adam Sandler movies are saved, it’s sobering to realize that some of the world’s great prose and poetry has gone missing. This witty and unique new book rectifies that wrong. Part detective story, part history, part exposé, The Book of Lost Books is the first guide to literature’s what-ifs and never-weres.In compulsively readable fashion, this book reveals details about tantalizing vanished works by the famous, acclaimed, and influential, from the time of cave drawings to the late twentieth century. Here are true stories behind stories, poems, and plays that now exist only in imagination:·Aristophanes’ Heracles, the Stage Manager was one of the playwright’s several spoofs that disappeared.·Love’s Labours Won may have been a sequel to Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost—or was it just an alternative title for The Taming of the Shrew?·Jane Austen’s incomplete novel Sanditon was a critique of hypochondriacs and cures started when the author was fatally ill.·Nikolai Gogol burned the second half of Dead Souls after a religious conversion convinced him that literature was paganism.·Some of the thousand pages of William Burroughs’s original Naked Lunch were stolen and sold on the street by Algerian street boys.·Sylvia Plath’s widower, Ted Hughes, claimed that the 130 pages of her second novel, perhaps based on their marriage, were lost after her death.Whether destroyed (Socrates’ versions of Aesop’s Fables), misplaced (Malcolm Lowry’s Ultramarine, pinched from his publisher’s car), interrupted by the author’s death (Robert Louis Stevenson’s Weir of Hermiston), or simply never begun (Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, America, a second volume of his memoirs), these missing links create a history of literature for a parallel world. Civilized, satirical, erudite yet accessible, The Book of Lost Books is a real find.

Annette Somerville, a young single mother, earns her living in a high-class Glasgow sauna parlour, scrupulously keeping her respectable home life separate from her professional activities. During a series of murders in the city, seemingly unconnected, Annette realises that all of the victims have been regular customers.
What should Annette do?  No one else seems interested, and her boss makes it clear that going to the police will cost Annette her job. But Annette's new boyfriend, a former customer of the sauna, could be the murderer's next victim.
Can Annette continue to keep her two lives separate, or are they destined to violently clash?

These short stories by the renowned Scottish author demonstrate the powerful imagination that became “the wonder of literary Scotland” (Sorley MacLean, author of Eimhir).   Growing up on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, Iain Crichton Smith was raised speaking Gaelic. When he went to school in Stornoway, he spoke English. Like many islanders before and since, his culture was divided. In After the Dance, he explores that tumultuous divide and its effects on the small communities he knew so well.   The stories in this volume prove that big themes—love, history, power, submission, death—can be addressed without the foil of irony. Instead, Smith reveals their resonance by rooting them in place, and giving them a voice that risks pure, humane, impassioned speech.   This updated edition includes the story ‘Home.’

A Scotsman in 1950s Asia becomes entangled in love and political unrest: “As a storyteller, Jenkins has few equals.” —TribuneSet in the Far East in the 1950s, Leila is a tender love story involving a Scottish teacher, Andrew Sandilands, and Leila, the exotically beautiful daughter of a local politician. Leila is, like her father, implicated in the revolutionary tremors shaking the small country, and the lovers are soon torn between the small-minded mores of the expatriate community and Leila’s determined efforts to play a role in her country’s future. The masked oppression of the regime forms the backdrop to a novel where personal dramas collide with the legacies of colonialism, in this absorbing novel from the prize-winning author of The Cone Gatherers.“A remarkable writer.” —The Times

The story of Deirdre of the Sorrows is widely known in Ireland, yet all but forgotten across the water in Scotland. This great tragic love story, which has its roots in the ninth or tenth century, is very much shared by both countries. For Deirdre, according to the legend, fled with her lover Naoise to Argyll. The oldest song in Scotland is believed to be Deirdre's haunting farewell to her adopted land as she returns once more to Ireland.
In this new sequence, Deirdre of the Sorrows, Kenneth Steven beautifully reimagines the legend of this love story; he brings back to life Deirdre's journey and attempts to capture its timeless power.