Inspired by real events The year is 1889. When a fire tears through the Mauricewood coal pit there is no escape. Of sixty-five men working, only two survive. Many of the bodies will not be recovered for months. Martha and her sister have lived with their granny since their mother died, but she is not kind. The death of their father in the Disaster means an end to any chance of a better life. For Martha’s stepmother, Jess, the wait for a body to bury, and the struggle to deal with a loss that is both collective and private, is agonizing. With many of the miners families left destitute, the women of Mauricewood undertake a campaign for compensation and justice against the criminally negligent pit owners. Martha and Jess’s stories lie at the heart of this elegy to the closeknit communities of the pit villages in a gripping tribute to resilience and courage in the face of utter catastrophe, based on true events, original source material and Alexander’s own family history. Praise for The Mauricewood Devils: 'A beautifully written book, affecting and eligiac, by a novelist who is also a poet. It is at once desperately sad and painful, uplifting and life-affirming. What saves the lives of the characters, as much as mere physical sustenance, is telling stories, both those they tell themselves consciously and those that visit them unbidden. And the book itself is a testament to the power of storytelling. It takes a long gone, largely forgotten historical event and brings it to life again.' Allison Miller, author of Demo

An ethics handbook for a profession unlike any other

Completely revised and updated, a new edition of the definitive reference book on all things Scottish. Since its first publication in 1994, The Collins Encyclopaedia of Scotland has established itself as the unrivalled reference book on the subject. Containing over a million words and five thousand entries, it covers every aspect of Scotland's past, her people, arts, industries, environment and continuing traditions. For this new, completely updated and revised edition, the editors have included over a thousand additions to existing entries and over a hundred completely new entries, from Billy Bremner to Dolly the Sheep, from John Smith to the new Scottish Parliament. Matching accessibility with scholarship, The Collins Encyclopaedia of Scotland has become the standard source for Scottish nationals, for Scots worldwide, and for anyone with an interest in Scotland.

Winner of the EBRD Literature Prize 2019 On New Years' Eve 1938, the writer Abdulla Qodiriy is taken from his home by the Soviet secret police and thrown into a Tashkent prison. There, to distract himself from the physical and psychological torment of beatings and mindless interrogations, he attempts to mentally reconstruct the novel he was writing at the time of his arrest - based on the tragic life of the Uzbek poet-queen Oyhon, married to three khans in succession, and living as Abdulla now does, with the threat of execution hanging over her. As he gets to know his cellmates, Abdulla discovers that the Great Game of Oyhon's time, when English and Russian spies infiltrated the courts of Central Asia, has echoes in the 1930s present, but as his identification with his protagonist increases and past and present overlap it seems that Abdulla's inability to tell fact from fiction will be his undoing. The Devils' Dance brings to life the extraordinary culture of 19th century Turkestan, a world of lavish poetry recitals, brutal polo matches, and a cosmopolitan and culturally diverse Islam rarely described in western literature. Hamid Ismailov's virtuosic prose recreates this multilingual milieu in a digressive, intricately structured novel, dense with allusion, studded with quotes and sayings, and threaded through with modern and classical poetry. With this poignant, loving resurrection of both a culture and a literary canon brutally suppressed by a dictatorship which continues today, Ismailov demonstrates yet again his masterful marriage of contemporary international fiction and the Central Asian literary traditions, and his deserved position in the pantheon of both.

Nought to sixty was a six month programme of exhibitions and events to celebrate ICA's sixtieth anniversary. It presented sixty projects by emerging artists in Great Britain and Ireland under the age of thirty five.