Tiffany McDaniel dedicated her book to the Chillicothe Six. On the dedication page, she names the victims. Charlotte Treggo , 27. Disappeared May 3 rd , 2014. Still missing. Tameka Lynch , 30. Disappeared May 2014. Body discovered in river. Wanda Lemons , 37. Disappeared November 4 th , 2014. Still missing. Shasta Himelrick , 20. Disappeared December 2014. Body discovered in river. Timberly Clayton , 38. Disappeared May 2015. Found shot to death...

The variety of work on ABC Tales never ceases to amaze and delight me, and sometimes that variety can be seen in the work of individual writers. A brilliant example of that is marandina, who has given us not only his engrossing Song to the Siren SF story, but also the beautiful and tender tale that is our Story of the Week, 'A Cat, A Leaf and Fresh Fish'. In this you will find love, loneliness and a mutual need felt and met: A Cat, A Leaf and...

Alan Warner’s debut novel Morven Caller was adapted and made into a film. He’s one of Scotland’s most successful writers. Nothing Left to Fear From Hell is a step away from the usual write-what-you-know school. A short novella. Bonnie Prince Charlie’s flight through the Highlands. Most readers know about his escape to France. So we know the ending. We think we know the plot. Why bother? Warner addresses these issues in Afterward . This could and...

The Barra Boy is a whodunnit split into three parts. Beginning (Part One: Ewan Fraser). Middle, (Part Two: The Barra Boy of the title). End (Part Three: Laura Robertson). What happened in Barra is split into two time frames. Ewan Fraser, a successful London solicitor, thinks he saw Billy Matheson on the other side of the window on the crowded Tube station in 2022. But Ewan is in his fifties. Yet Billy seemed to be the same eleven or twelve-year-...

my brother My brother is much better he wtll make it. Praise God.

Everything has a past, even the future. Let Scotland be Scotland it the cry here, but what type of Scotland and who’s Scotland are we talking about? He takes a page out of Hugh MacDiarmid’s On a Raised Beach : ‘…We are so easily baffled by appearances And do not realise that those stones are at one with the stars. It makes no difference to them whether they are high or low, Mountain peak or ocean floor, palace or pigsty. There are plenty of...

Looks like I'm all on my own again. Wish my brother would come home.

George Mackay Brown writes about what he knows. An Orkney life. His characters are crofters, grounded in the shallow soil and windblown sea, their surnames a mark of where they bide. One bleeds into the other in a communal life in which Mackay Brown is poetically versed. The opening lines of The Golden Bird show this by documenting an island feud. ‘They had not spoken to each other, the crofts of Gorse and Feaquoy, for three generations. And...

The Promise won the 2021 Booker Prize. The premise is simple, but it got muddled up in my mind. Ma (Rachel Swart) has terminal cancer. She makes Pa (Herman Albertus Swart, known as Mannie) promise that he’ll leave the house and title deeds to the woman that has nursed her and helped bring up her children, Salome. But the hired help, or servant, is black. She lives with her son, Lukas, on what is termed The Lombard Place. A farm worker’s home...