Scotland’s Favourite Book

I've cried at their loss. I've applauded their triumphs.

Scotland has a long and rich literary tradition, with authors

such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Muriel Spark and Alasdair Gray.

The stories that we love help us understand who we are.

Adventure stories, the supernatural, suspense,

dark realism, family drama, romance and, of course, crime.

Back in the summer we invited you

to vote for your favourite Scottish book.

And tonight, we can reveal the result.

Welcome to Scotland's Favourite Book.

From an initial longlist of 30 novels, selected by

a literary panel and curated by the Scottish Book Trust, we're about to

divulge your top ten, including the all-important number one.

And along the way,

some famous faces will be revealing their own top read.

So to start, a 19th-century Gothic classic and one of the first novels

to explore the dark Scottish psyche.

"Go thou then," said he.

"Thou are called to a high vocation,

"to cleanse this sanctuary of thy God

"in this native land by the shedding of blood.

"Go thou then, like a ruling energy,

"a master spirit of desolation in the dwellings of the wicked.

"High shall be your reward both here and in the hereafter."

I first read the Private Memoirs And Confessions Of A Justified Sinner

when I was in my twenties.

It was gripping and extraordinary then.

Rereading it, it is even more compelling.

James Hogg's masterpiece was first published in 1824,

but it strikes you as a very modern work.

It's a complex tale of demonic possession,

of the struggle between good and evil within one man's soul.

The justified sinner in question, Robert Wringhim,

regards himself as one of the elect.

One of the chosen few who, without doubt,

will escape eternal damnation.

What this means to him, ultimately, is that he can do anything.

Soon after young Wringhim is told by his reverend father

that he's one of the elect,

he meets a shape-shifting devilish figure walking in the woods,

who assures him he really can do what he wants,

including killing his own brother.

"I had a desire to slay him, it is true.

"And such a desire as a thirsty man has to drink,

"but at the same time, this longing desire

"was mingled with a certain terror

"as if I had dreaded that the drink for which I longed was mixed

"with deadly poison.

"My mind had so weakened, or rather softened about this time,

"that my faith began a little to give way and I doubted

"most presumptuously of the least tangible of all Christian tenets,

"that is the infallibility of the elect."

It is a tale framed within a tale,

where the editor's narrative offers one version of events

and Wringhim's private memoirs and confessions the other.

The author raises many questions that the reader is left to answer.

Just what is going on?

Is it Satan himself who walks the streets of Glasgow?

Is it Satan or some disturbed psychological trait

that's behind the dark and murderous deeds in an Edinburgh close?

Who do we believe - the narrator of the justified sinner?

What's amazing to me is how fresh and fast-paced Hogg's work is.

Some may see it as a Gothic novel,

some as a psychological crime thriller.

It's certainly a scathing attack on dogmatic thought.

With the Reverend Wringhim and his son Robert, we see a lack of doubt,

a clear moral certitude

that foreshadows totalitarian mindsets of the 20th century

and echoes religious fanatics of earlier and indeed current times.

This is a... This is a terrific book.

You should flood your library with requests for it.

Next up, a collection of stories, again set in the 19th century,

about a certain sleuth who remains very much in our thoughts,

and in our screens, thanks to a Mr Cumberbatch.

When young doctor Arthur Conan Doyle

wrote The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes in 1892,

he couldn't have foreseen that his detective's popularity would

go on to span three centuries.

And that Holmes would become the most portrayed character ever

on film and television.

SHUTTERS CLICK PHOTOGRAPHER: Put the hat on!

Yeah, put it on!

Just...get it over with.

APPLAUSE

Cumberbatch is just one of more than 70 actors to have donned

Sherlock's famous deerstalker hat.

Murder, my dear Watson.

It was while Conan Doyle was studying medicine

here in his native Edinburgh that he met

the man who would inspire his famous sleuth.

I used, as a student, to have an old professor, whose name was Bell,

who was extraordinarily quick at deductive work.

He'd make his diagnosis of the disease,

and also very often of the patient's nationality and occupation,

entirely by his power of observation.

Literature's first forensic detective proved so popular,

Conan Doyle was kept busy writing Holmes stories

for more than 40 years.

The book at number eight was published almost a century later,

proving that, as a nation, we always love a good crime story.

It was our introduction to

a somewhat troubled Edinburgh detective.

In Knots Crosses, Ian Rankin

sets his SAS operative-turned- hard-drinking cop, John Rebus,

on the hunt for a serial killer,

who leaves a trail of strangled young girls

across Scotland's capital.

The only clues, a series of knots made of string

and matchstick crosses delivered through Rebus's door.

Rankin saw Knots Crosses as

a 20th-century reworking of Robert Louis Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde.

Hidden behind Edinburgh's picture- perfect elegant architecture

lies a far darker vision of the city.

First appearing in 1985,

Rebus has gone on to become one of Britain's most popular

fictional detectives and is still cracking cases 31 years later.

Seventh in your top ten,

we're sticking in Edinburgh for a novel which garnered cult status

in the 1990s and inspired a play, a film and a killer soundtrack.

Trainspotting, the book and then the film,

gave voice to young working-class Edinburgh.

Choose life, choose a job, choose a career.

Choose a family, choose a ... big television, choose washing machines,

cars, compact disc players and electrical tin-openers.

TYRES SCREECH

HE LAUGHS

I bought Trainspotting because it was one of those books

that everyone was talking about at the time.

It was one of those moments that happens maybe every 10 or 20 years,

and it seemed to be one of those books that people

who didn't normally read books were getting into.

I remember getting on the plane to London and the air steward

clocked the book in my hand and looked down at it

and he smiled and said, "You're going to enjoy that."

It just seemed to be a book that everyone was getting behind.

Set in mid-1980s Leith, Irvine Welsh's irreverent debut,

and the iconic film that soon followed,

tells the story of a group of so-called friends

tied together by heroin addiction and their attempts to escape

the boredom and brutality of their lives.

Never again, Swanney, I'm off the skag.

Are you serious? Yeah. No more. I'm finished with that.

Irvine Welsh's capacity to shock is something truly astonishing

and, trust me, I'm hard to shock. He lives in a grey area.

His characters are morally ambiguous thieves, addicts,

sociopaths, and yet somehow - somehow - he makes us sympathise

with his antihero, Mark Renton.

One of the scenes that stayed with me was when one of Renton's

junkie pals loses her baby and he starts cooking up.

Lesley comes intae the room screaming. It's horrible.

Ah wanted her tae stop. Now. Ah couldnae handle this.

Nane ay us could.

"No' now. Not now."

Ah never wanted anything mair in my life

than fir her tae stop screaming.

"The bairn's away! The bairn's away! Dawn! Oh, my God!"

"She was a good mother. She loved that bairn. It's naebody's fault.

"Cot death an' that. Happens all the time."

"Yeah, likesay, cot death, man. Ken what ah mean?" Spud agreed.

Ah feel thit ah love thum aw. Matty, Spud, Sick Boy and Lesley.

Ah want tae tell them. Ah try, but it comes oot as, "Ah'm cookin'."

They look at us scoobied.

"That's me," ah shrug ma shooders, in self-justification.

I go ben the livin'-room.

The gadges move a few steps back and watch in silence as ah cook.

Lesley comes first, eftir me. That goes without saying.

The moments of genuine shock in these books

are easily in double figures.

You're entering this world of high drama and yet it feels

believable because it's written with such confidence.

Irvine Welsh is never scared of what people would think.

Trainspotting never apologises

for speaking in its own language of its own world.

And that at the time was very un-Scottish.

Your sixth favourite book may not be set in the capital,

but it was inspired by the city, where its author still lives.

It's the first in her magical series and it's sold

more than 100 million copies worldwide, and counting.

"Perhaps it had something to do with living in a dark cupboard,

"but Harry had always been small and skinny for his age.

"Harry had a thin face, knobbly knees,

"black hair and bright green eyes.

"He wore round glasses held together with a lot of Sellotape.

"The only thing Harry liked about his own appearance was a very

"thin scar on his forehead which was shaped like a bolt of lightning."

THUNDERCLAP

In 1996, a then unknown JK Rowling bewitched readers the world over

with her young wizard's very first adventure,

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

On Harry's 11th birthday, he's saved from humdrum Muggle -

that's ordinary human to you and me - existence

by the discovery he has magical powers,

and is summoned for his first year

at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

"First-year students will require

"three sets of plain work robes, black.

"One pointed hat, black, for daywear.

"One pair of protective gloves, dragon-hide or similar.

"One winter cloak, black, silver fastenings.

"Please note that all pupils' clothes should carry nametags."

I first read the book when I was 23 and I loved it immediately.

JK Rowling's tale of an orphan boy with special powers

who's drawn into a complex adult world,

who has to avenge his parents' killers,

who has to fight evil personified

by his nemesis Voldemort, is exceptional.

The reason I love the book is the heart.

I followed each of the characters' emotional journeys

like a rollercoaster.

I've cried at their loss. I've applauded their triumphs.

The good thing is, I can return to Harry's world whenever I like

through the books and the spectacular films.

THEY ROAR

JK Rowling wrote most of the novel longhand

in a few of the city's cafes,

and legend has it she wrote some of it here, at the Elephant House.

But cafes weren't the only ingredient

in the Harry Potter recipe.

Where better than Edinburgh,

with its Gothic Old Town, to inspire a tale of magic?

Wingardium Leviosa!

And it's in this historic Greyfriars Kirkyard

that JK Rowling found the names of some of her characters.

Like Professor McGonagall, Professor Moody

and of course Tom Riddle,

also known as Voldemort.

Well, we're halfway through your top ten now,

and if Trainspotting depicted the dark, drug-fuelled side

of Edinburgh life, then the book at number five paints

a very different picture of the city

and features only the creme de la creme of educated young ladies.

Set in 1932, Muriel Spark's most famous book presents

a world on the cusp of change,

with her forceful literary creation Miss Jean Brodie leading the charge,

and personified on film by Maggie Smith

in an Oscar-winning performance.

Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life.

You girls are my vocation.

Miss Brodie's charm, glamour and unconventional ideas

hold dangerous sway over the Brodie set

at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls,

as they are introduced to a world of adult games beyond their ken,

and inspired to acts of bravery and betrayal.

Our next novel takes its man-on-the-run hero

on a breathless journey from London

to the Galloway Hills and back again,

for an adventure thriller that's inspired numerous adaptations,

not least by the master of suspense himself, Alfred Hitchcock.

WHISTLE BLOWS

"My notion was to get off to some wild district...

"..for I would be like a trapped rat in a city.

"I fixed on Galloway as the best place to go.

"It was the nearest wild part of Scotland."

This is the very spot in Mossdale where Buchan's antihero,

Richard Hannay, gets off the train and starts his Scottish adventure.

I first read The Thirty-Nine Steps as a teenager

and was swept away by the nail-biting pace, jeopardy,

double-crossing and endlessly surprisingly plot twists

that keep the reader, and its hero, guessing till the very last pages.

John Buchan published his most popular novel in 1915,

a story so thrilling it inspired

a young Alfred Hitchcock to create one of his best early films.

It's a tale involving national secrets,

German spies and an innocent man framed for murder.

Richard Hannay heads to the hills to escape both the police

and the evil cabal of the Black Stone gang,

who are conspiring to ignite a global conflict.

"I was in a wide semicircle of moorland, with the brown river

"as radius, and the high hills forming the northern circumference.

"There was not sign or sound of a human being,

"only the plashing water and the interminable crying of curlews.

"Yet, oddly enough,

"for the first time I felt the terror of the hunted on me."

As Hannay's chase propels him from hillside to country inn,

he borrows, or steals, many a different man's identity

in a desperate attempt to resist arrest and foil the villainous gang.

The Thirty-Nine Steps is more than an ingenious page-turner.

With its brilliant narration, spare prose style

and wonderful turns of phrase,

it feels fresh and contemporary.

It's both spy detective and adventure story,

but its author defined the novel as a romance,

where the incidents defy the probabilities

and march just inside the borders of the possible.

Moving on to your top three, your third-favourite Scottish novel

is the author's semi-biographical masterwork.

It's set in Glasgow and a nightmarish parallel city,

and fuses fantasy and reality

in one man's desperate search for happiness.

"A city on the banks of a shrunk river."

"A city with a 19th-century square full of ugly statues.

"Am I right?

"That city is called Unthank.

"The calendar in Unthank is based on sunlight

"but only administrators use it. The majority have forgotten the sun.

"Moreover, they have rejected the clock. They do not measure or plan.

"Their lives are regulated by simple appetite

"varied by the occasional impulse."

"Not surprisingly, nobody is well there."

It may have taken Alasdair Gray 30 years to write, but when Lanark was

finally published in 1981, it was a game-changer for Scottish fiction.

Gray's visionary modern classic transcends categorisation

and genre

as it flits between surreal science fiction and naturalism,

following the journey of flawed hero Duncan Thaw,

AKA Lanark, through two divergent worlds.

I first read Lanark when I came to live in this city ten years ago,

and I love its honesty about being stuck in a dysfunctional male body

while striving to make art

and striving to get close to the gorgeous, bright young arty females

that he, Duncan, so desires.

"They were late for the film."

"It had love scenes,

"which made him very conscious of Marjory beside him."

"He leaned toward her..."

"..but she sat so upright and stared so straight forward..."

"..that he dispiritedly brought out the chocolates

"and resignedly popped one at intervals..."

"..into her mouth."

I love that his epic vision of Scotland

is not the mythical hills and glens of the Highlands,

but this city of Glasgow, where he grew up and still lives today -

and in its colossal scale, it has this real Blakean quality,

for me, to its artistry and its scope,

that makes Glasgow seem both heroic and darkly Satanic.

It's a very simple tale, really, but told with such timeless imagination,

and that's why it gets my vote.

Your runner-up at number two

was the first book to be published by this writer, in 1984.

It's a murderous tale of a psychopathic teenager

and his family's dark secrets,

played out on a remote Scottish island.

In Iain Banks' debut The Wasp Factory,

16-year-old Frank Cauldhame is the self-appointed lord of his island,

where he lives with his experimental scientist father

and violent, unhinged brother on the loose from a psychiatric hospital.

Frank occupies his days hunting small animals and prophesying

the future through bizarre, savage rituals.

A highly original gothic horror,

Banks's novel is a study in obsession, blood and death.

I looked for the two most eccentric things I'd ever done -

one was building dams,

and the other one was being a schoolboy bombmaker,

so I had to - you know, I could write fairly convincingly

about those things, so I put those into the book -

but everything else is made up, honest.

The Wasp Factory showcased the late Iain Banks'

brilliantly bizarre imaginative powers,

and became the first of many cult classics and science-fiction epics

by this prolific author.

And so, finally, we come to your favourite Scottish novel.

It's an early 20th-century classic,

again set in a remote community in the north-east of Scotland.

Your number one choice is the story of a farmer's daughter

caught up in the conflict

between the traditional way of life and the modern world.

"Below and around where Chris Guthrie lay

"the June moors whispered and rustled and shook their cloaks,

"yellow with broom and powdered faintly with purple,

"that was the heather but not the full passion of its colour yet.

"And in the east against the cobalt blue of the sky

"lay the shimmer of the North Sea, that was by Bervie."

Sunset Song tells the story of young heroine Chris Guthrie

as she comes of age in the tight-knit farming community

of fictional Kinraddie

in author Lewis Grassic Gibbon's native Aberdeenshire.

I first read Sunset Song when I was in my early teens,

so, maybe about 13 or 14,

and it resonated with me, firstly because it's a wonderful story,

beautifully written -

but it also said something about the history of the country I grew up in,

and resonated very strongly with me as a young Scottish woman,

and I think its themes are timeless to this day.

I think it's a very early feminist novel.

She's just a very, very strong character -

at a time, you know, Sunset Song was written in the early 1930s,

at a time when not many books would have portrayed

a female character in that way.

"Two Chrisses there were that fought for her heart and tormented her.

"You hated the land and the coarse speak of the folk

"and learning was brave and fine one day,

"and the next you'd waken with the peewits crying across the hills,

"deep and deep, crying in the heart of you

"and the smell of the earth in your face,

"almost you'd cry for that."

Chris, as a character, does personify the story of Scotland.

We see her struggling to come to terms with some of the changes

taking place around her.

"And the land changes,

"their parks and their steadings are a desolation,

"where the sheep are pastured."

"We are told that great machines come soon to till the land,

"and the great herds come to feed on it."

"The crofter has gone,

"the man with the house and the steading of his own

"and the land closer to his heart than the flesh of his body.

"Nothing, it has been said, is true but change, nothing abides."

He did something quite innovative and ground-breaking,

in that he used...you know, his own language, in that sense,

in a fictional setting,

and that was, for me, part of the mystique and the magic of the book.

I grew up in Ayrshire, so it opened my eyes to parts of the country

that I hadn't, until that point, been very familiar with.

Tragically, Grassic Gibbon died just three years after the first book

in his Scots Quair trilogy was published.

But thanks to school reading lists and radio, TV and film versions,

many of us have grown up with Sunset Song,

and his masterpiece lives on.

I'm delighted to champion my favourite Scottish book -

and, as it turns out, Scotland's favourite book -

Sunset Song.

So, to one of my heroines, the fantastic, wonderful Chris Guthrie,

congratulations on making it to number one.

So, that's it - Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon

is Scotland's favourite book.

Now, if you haven't read it, or any of the others in the top ten,

then I do hope you're inspired to do so -

and if you'd like to see the result of all 30 in the longlist,

then go to...

Goodnight, and happy reading.