The Potter’s Tale is a story of one man’s journey of discovery and self discovery on one of the most beautiful islands on the Hebrides – Colonsay. Dion Alexander was ‘the Colonsay Potter’ through the 1970s and his own story is interwoven with that of some of the legendary characters of the islands in that period, one of the last in which Gaelic came naturally to the community. It is also the story of beginning to think about how to keep a small remote community dominated by a landed estate...

"At the aural epicenter, Robb Moreira and Sura Siu alternate betweenprotagonists Aldo and Regan’s perspectives. The listener is immersed into their sharply distinct, mundane, yet complex worlds..."- Booklist**Narrated primarily by Robb Moreira and Sura Siu, this program features a cast of cameos, including one from the author.From Olivie Blake, the New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six, comes a...

“In a world of self-help, this is true inspiration, deeply admirable without the distance of heroism, bracing without stridency and, ultimately, generous. The mountain, Shepherd tells us, is ‘a corrective of glib assessment.’ So is its book.” —The New York Times Book Review**An internationally bestselling classic on the power of the natural world—“part memoir, part field notebook, part lyrical meditation on nature and our relationship with it, evocative of...

The Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Finkler Question went Down Under, and this is what he hilariously found.On what he calls “the adventure of his life,” Howard Jacobson travels around Australia, never entirely sure where he is heading next or whether he has the courage to tackle the wild life of the bush, the wild men of the outback, or the even wilder women of the seaboard cities.In pursuit of the best of Australian good times, he joins re...

The hilarious bestselling travel book that journeys round areas made famous by Radio 4's Shipping Forecast'One of those simple yet brilliant ideas' Daily Mail'Engaging and often very funny' Sunday Times'A wonderfully eccentric study' ObserverThe Shipping Forecast is a curious piece of broadcasting; at once impenetrably baffling yet at the same time reassuringly f...

Between the laundry and the fetching kids from school, that's how birds enter my life. I listen. During a lull in the traffic: oyster-catchers; in the school-playground, sparrows. lt's surprising what you can find by simply stepping out to look. Award-winning poet Kathleen Jamie has an eye and an ease with the nature and landscapes of Scotland as well as an incisive sense of our domestic realities. In Findings she draws together these themes to describe travels like no other contemporary w...

'You've had some pretty crazy ideas in your life, Newby, but this is the craziest.' Grandmother Wanda Newby was exasperated after continuous rain, snow, and gales that knocked from her bike. Twice.To avoid other tourists, Eric Newby had decided that the depths of winter would be the very best time to explore Ireland by mountain bike. More astonishing still, he managed to persuade Wanda, his long-suffering wife and life-long co-traveller, to accompany him – mainly, she admitted, to ...

As Ellie’s fiftieth birthday approaches and her ambitions of a steady income, a successful career and an ascent of Everest seem as far away as ever, she begins to doubt she’s capable of achieving anything at all. So when her best friend Mick suggests a gruelling cycle ride from Land’s End to John o’Groats, she takes up the challenge. They opt for the scenic route which takes them along cycle paths, towpaths and the back roads and byways of Britain, unable to resist sampling local beers in ...

A homage to a remarkable poet and his world.'At The Loch of Green Corrie is more than merely elegant, more than a collection of albeit fascinating insights, laugh-out-loud observations and impressively broad erudition' - Sunday Herald'You could easily make a case that Andrew Greig has the greatest range of any living Scottish writer' - ScotsmanFor many years Andrew Greig saw the poet Norman MacCaig as a fath...

Tell someone you're going off to Scotland to walk the Southern Upland Way and they'll probably look at you rather blankly before starting to tell you about Great Aunt Mabel's recent hip operation. Even in walking circles, it's not exactly a well known trail.Which is why, when Andrew Bowden told anyone who would listen that he was going to Scotland to walk the Southern Upland Way, everyone looked at him blankly and started telling him about Great Aunt Mabel's recent hip operation.

Take one headstrong dog and a feisty young woman, and send them off on a walk for the equivalent distance of London to Delhi. Tess the dog flirts outrageously with good-looking farmers and charms unsuspecting toddlers into parting with their ice creams as her apologetic owner follows. From sleepy fishing villages to urban streets, spotting avocets and flamingos along the way, Spud slows life down for a year and experiences the coastline of Britain with its eccentric mix of innovation and t...

When John McPhee returned to the island of his ancestors—Colonsay, twenty-five miles west of the Scottish mainland—a hundred and thirty-eight people were living there. About eighty of these, crofters and farmers, had familial histories of unbroken residence on the island for two or three hundred years; the rest, including the English laird who owned Colonsay, were "incomers." Donald McNeill, the crofter of the title, was working out his existence in this last domain of the feudal system; t...