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 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-gray" 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 illustrated story of the changing shape of Scotland is underpinned and illuminated by Moira Burgess' narrative, which subtly blends stories and verse with fact and fiction. Complete with a full index of place names, writers and notes on their work, this text aims to offer the ultimate literary tour to those who appreciate great Scottish writing combined with the beauty of the land that inspired it.

Author Biography

Moira Burgess is a novelist, short-story writer and literary historian whose publications include The Glasgow Novel and Imagine a City, a history of Glasgow fiction. She has edited anthologies of short stories and Scottish women's writing and is currently researching the work of Naomi Mitchison.