For an eleven-year-old boy, living with his widowed mother and younger brother in a remote seaside village on one of the Western Isles of Scotland, growing up has its difficulties, as well as its idyllic...

In the grey streets of Glasgow, Martin is dreaming of the mist-shrouded islands of his youth. Behind her desk in the travel agency his wife Jean dreams of faraway places in the sun that beckon from the...

Mark Simmons, aged 42, is a teacher at a training college. His wife has just walked out on him because she has found him so much less interesting than she expected the man she married to be. This event,...

The tenement has its being, its almost independent being, in a small Scottish town. Built of grey granite, more than a century ago, it stands four-square in space and time, the one fixed point in the...

Tom and Vera Mallow, who are in only their early thirties, might indeed be said to be in the autumn of their lives already, they are school teachers, both of them, but without any strong feeling for children,...

'When the breathing got worse he went into the adjacent room and got the copy of Dante. All that night and the night before he had been watching the dying...When a mirror was required to be brought she...

Ralph Simmons, a writer, struggles to survive a nervous breakdown that leaves him anxious, suspicious, and frightened. In the Middle of the Wood is considered by many to be Iain Crichton Smith's most...

The titular Mr Dixon is not the novel's main character but the creation of the novel's main character, Tom Spence. Spence describes himself as "an embryo novelist"; he has had the odd job - for example,...

As a child Iain Crichton Smith was raised speaking Gaelic on the island of Lewis. At school in Stornoway he spoke English. Like many islanders before and since, his culture was divided: two languages...

The world, in Iain Crichton Smith's vision is a field full of folk; and one Scottish village is its microcosm. Here, the Minister wrestles with his loss of faith, and his cancer, concealing them even...

In the summer of 1870, a seventeen-year-old crofter's son turned his back on his apprenticeship with the Royal Clan and Tartan Warehouse in Inverness and signed up as a private in Queen Victoria's army.He...

The eviction of the crofters from their homes between 1792 and the 1850s was one of the cruellest episodes in Scotland's history. In this novel Iain Crichton Smith captures the impact of the Highland...

Although best-known as one of Scotland's greatest modern poets, Iain Crichton Smith was also prolific as a writer of short stories. These pieces form a central part of his oeuvre, demonstrating the full...

A sensitively written and memorable novel of youth by one of Scotland's most distinguished twentieth century writers.Malcolm, studious, imaginative, footballing, shy, sexually aware but uncomfortably...

Trevor Griersor, a Scottish university lecturer, is spending a term in Canberra, lecturing on Scottish authors. One day a stranger phones, with garbled news of Trevor's brother Norman who vanished in...

Iain Crichton Smith's Collected Poems was awarded the Saltire Prize when it was published in 1992. This completely revised and enlarged edition includes seventy additional poems, mostly from the four...

Growing up on the Isle of Lewis, Iain Crichton Smith spoke only Gaelic until he was five. But at school in Bayble and then Stornoway, everything had to be in English. Like many islanders before and since,...

A play about a man who cannot, or will not, get out of bed one morning for 'metaphysical reasons'. As the day progresses he is visited by his brother, neighbours, doctor, Death and Immanuel Kant. First...

Now considered a modern classic, CONSIDER THE LILIES focuses on the eviction of an old woman from her croft.The Highland Clearances, the eviction of crofters from their homes between 1792 and the 1850s,...

A triptych of short plays on the theme of family, from three generations of Scottish writers.Acts by Riccardo Galgani: an old couple have not seen their son in years. One day he walks back into their...