We asked Scotland's most influential authors, politicians, poets, publishers, historians and other notable bookworms for their favourite books of the year.
Earlier we listed the top seven books of 2015 and told you what our leading authors had by their bedside table.
Here, some of our top politicians tell us what books they read in 2015 and why they couldn't put them down.
Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister of Scotland
Books were a huge part of my childhood and I still enjoy reading when I can – although my time is sometimes limited. Some of the books I’ve enjoyed reading most this year are by Val McDermid - The Skeleton Road (Sphere, £8.99) and Splinter the Silence (Little, Brown £18.99). Given 2015 is the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide, The Skeleton Road is very poignant as it tells the story of a massacre in a small Croatian village during the Balkan Wars, while Splinter the Silence is the latest addition to her extensive back catalogue.
Scotland is home to wonderful authors and Val is one of our finest. She’s also part of the modern tartan noir movement alongside other authors such as Ian Rankin, Christopher Brookmyre and William McIlvanney. Scottish writers have had a fascination with crime fiction that dates back to Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle – there must be something in our DNA that not only makes us captivated by crime fiction, but makes us excel at it, too.
Ruth Davidson, Scottish Conservative leader
The vast batch of my fiction reading is done in the summer and there must be something about the sun which attracts me to tales of darker deeds. The first book that stands out for me this year is Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train (Doubleday, £12.99) – an engrossing psychological thriller which, to my mind, absolutely deserves the success, attention and sales that have come its way.
Hawkins – a former journalist – has a beautiful sense of pace and the characters she’s created are compellingly real. No spoilers from me, but she really keeps the reader guessing until the final reveal. My second choice also has a journalistic connection. Andrew Nicoll is best known to MSPs as the political editor of The Scottish Sun, but also moonlights as a maddeningly accomplished novelist.
The Secret Life and Curious Death of Miss Jean Milne (Black and White, £8.99) is set in his native Broughty Ferry and is based on a true story; a decades old tale that has captivated the local community.
Using real police files recently released through a Freedom of Information request, Nicoll builds a perfect cast of characters as he tries to solve this murderous whodunnit.
In reality, the killer was never caught, but the reader is left in no doubt as to why, how and by whom Ms Milne was slain.
Kezia Dugdale, Scottish Labour Party leader
The book I remember best from school is To Kill a Mockingbird. I don’t know anybody who has not been transfixed by the account of the 1930s America, as recounted by a six-year-old girl in awe of her lawyer father. The film adaptation with Gregory Peck also did justice to Harper Lee’s masterpiece. Go Set A Watchman (William Heinemann) was probably the most significant book published in 2015. Some have criticised it when compared to the original, but I think that’s unfair. I enjoyed the realism of it all. We are appalled by Atticus Finch’s apparently transformed attitude to race, but isn’t that a realistic portrayal of life and all its disappointments? Go Set A Watchman was gritty in its portrayal of complex issues. I’d recommend it.
Patrick Harvie, co-convener, Scottish Green Party
PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason (Allen Lane, £16.99) will be of little interest to those who imagine that capitalism is simply picking itself up and dusting itself down after the minor inconvenience of the global financial crisis and the recession that followed. But to those who have long seen not only the inequality which modern capitalism has created but also its fundamental incompatibility with a finite planet, the book was required reading this year. If you believe that change is coming, you may find that Mason is asking many of the right questions.
Michael Russell, MSP
Scottish Sun political editor turned magical-realism novelist Andrew Nicoll has found a new and haunting voice in his first historically based crime story, The Secret Life and Curious Death of Miss Jean Milne (Black & White £8.99), which mixes madness, murder and moral claustrophobia in Broughty Ferry. Equally gripping was Barton Swain’s The Speechwriter (Simon & Schuster, £14.99). This account of the three years and ten months Swain (an American who studied in Edinburgh) spent as speechwriter to the governor of South Carolina is the most painfully accurate account of life inside politics I have ever read, yet also the most entertaining. His learned distaste for politicians is absolutely understandable after what he suffered as a result of the governor’s narcissistic, irrational, arrogant and ultra-demanding approach which culminated in a spectacular though long drawn out act of political self-immolation involving an Argentinian mistress, a false story about hiking on the Appalachian Trail and a botched impeachment process. However, the book is also a beautifully written and very thoughtful dissertation on the nature of political language, which makes it invaluable for anyone who has to speak that tongue.
David Steel, Rt Hon Lord Steel of Aikwood
In a year full of politics I especially enjoyed In It Together, the story of the coalition government, by Matthew D’Ancona (Viking, £25); British Liberal Leaders by Brack, Ingham and Little (Biteback, £25), and as a welcome relief from those the masterly novel Lion Heart by Justin Cartwright (Bloomsbury, £8.99).
See The Herald on Saturday and the Sunday Herald for the full list.
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