Land Lines

Take a journey - real or imaginary - from the comfort of your armchair. Through quiet glens, over barren moors and hills, along lochside, seashore or city streets. On the way, indulge in the company of a host of Scottish writers across a rich diversity of language and dialect, century by century from Allan Ramsay to Ian Rankin, Stevenson to Spark, McGonagall to MacNeacail, Hogg to Irvine Welsh ...Land Lines is an illustrated guide to the literature and landscape of Scotland, an inspiring and imaginative journey over a panoramic sweep of Scottish literary history - inviting you to travel through time and place, memory and emotion, as expressed through the personal vision of our writers and poets. Feel the raw, open landscape: 'cauld is the snaw wind', chilling to the bone. Stand still and breathe in the 'sweet air' of the windy hilltops, or dream of distant 'misty blue islands' lost at sea. Travel east from rural retreat to cityscape, glimpsing the 'stane-grey' granite of Aberdeen. Take the road south and drift back in time to imagine the 'grimy tenements' and the 'lums of the reikan toun' of historic Old Edinburgh. Then west, to the brash-new 'concrete, glass and steel' design of an emerging, contemporary Glasgow.This richly illustrated story of the changing shape of Scotland is underpinned and illuminated by the narrative mastery of Moira Burgess, seamlessly and subtly blending stories and verse, fact with fiction. Stunning photography by Marius Alexander and Paul Basu works with the narration to create a perceptive and fresh insight into the nature of a land and its people. The book is lavishly illustrated throughout, with over 180 full-colour photographs.Complete with a full index of place names and writers and notes on their work, this unique book offers the ultimate literary tour - for all who appreciate great Scottish writing captured with the beauty of the land that has inspired it.