ON A typically warm and sunny day, it seems fitting that Tuesday's book festival should be so concerned with home, or the strangeness of home. Scotland without rain and wind certainly feels pretty strange (although not as strange as calling North Berwick ''the Biarritz of the north'', as crime writer Quintin Jardine quoted one of his less-observing characters).

Questions of identity, nationality, and cultural ownership dominated the day. And that's not to exclude dead-body identifying either. Jardine's reading was packed full of precisely the sort of well-dressed, respectable people you can be sure would write letters to the BBC complaining about too much sex and violence on TV. But here they were, all eager for more. In the best tradition of Scottish success stories, Jardine spends most of his time writing in Spain. If Ian Rankin is the Robert Carlyle of Scottish crime writers, then Jardine is

surely its Sean Connery.

Columnist and editor John Walsh entertained and amused with readings from his memoir The Falling Angels, about growing up in 1960s Battersea in a large Irish Catholic family (''the only English thing in the house was my accent''). Conscious of ''trying on different identities'' when he was younger, Walsh was now, he assured us, perfectly comfortable in his own skin, sure of who he was, before hesitating over whether he would support England or Ireland at rugby. (He supports Ireland.) Ah yes, the Tebbit Test, he sighed.

West Indian-born Caryl Phillips read from his latest book, Atlantic Sound, a personal account of his retracing of the journey his parents made to England in the 1950s on a banana boat (''the journey from hell!''). ''I have been trying to figure out for a long time what home means to me both personally and historically.'' (You have the feeling that Phillips would know exactly what to do with a Tebbit Test, and it wouldn't be nice.)

Linda Grant, the recent Orange Prize winner, who has written movingly about her mother's dementia in Remind Me Who I Am Again, this time concentrated on the fictional journey of a young Jewish girl to Palestine in 1946, in her award-winning When I Live In Modern Times. For Walsh, Phillips, and Grant, the past isn't necessarily a foreign country, even if they do do things differently there. For all these writers, the question of ''home'' and ''a foreign place'' are, as Phillips argued, flexible terms, occasionally problematic when the inevitable question ''and where are you from?'' is raised.

It must be a generational thing - or post-millennial, or post-something - but suddenly parents are a big issue, along with their heritage bequeathed to us which we can no longer take for granted. In the second of the Institute of Ideas sessions, Who owns Culture?, Roy Hattersley resisted robustly any criticisms of cultural imperialism when it comes to the thorny issue of what a nation should keep by way of its cultural artefacts, and what it should give back: ''I think the Elgin Marbles are part of my culture. They ought to be where they can be looked after best.'' (Which is presumably not in a Greek museum.)

The question of home for objects of art stolen, appropriated, or bought from those unable or unwilling to hold on to them is no less complex than for those concerned with national identity, retracing their parents' footsteps. It seems hard to imagine, but would Dorothy still be able to sigh wistfully ''there's no place like home?'' Not in today's multicultural, post-modern world. And especially not if she was made of Greek marble.