BOOKS: Audiobooks

For Linda Cracknell, exposure to wind, rock, mist, and salt water is integral to her writing process. In this wonderful essay collection, she explores her inspirations, in nature and from other artists and their work, and she offers thoughtful writing prompts.

Climbing is a sport of perception, and our level of attainment is a matter of mind as much as body. Written by philosopher, essayist, and lifelong climber Francis Sanzaro, The Zen of Climbing explores the fundamentals of successful climbing, delving into sports psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and Taoism. Awareness, he argues, is the foundation of climbing, allowing us to merge mental and physical attributes in one embodied whole. Written by the author of the classic The Boulder: A Philosophy of Bouldering, this book puts the climber’s mind at the forefront of practice.

The personal collides with the political in this literary tour-de-force. In the 1950s, an eminent British writer pens a novel questioning the ethics of the nuclear destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki—but soon he’s trying to outrun his own past. This is as much a thrilling romance as it is a sensitive exploration of blame, power and guilt in post-war America, Japan and Britain. With a narrator whose behaviour strikes the national conscience as much as his own, An Exquisite Sense of What is Beautiful will stay with readers long after the final page is turned.

Winner of the NorthBound Book Award 2021 | Cold Fish Soup is a memoir in essays, a series of funny, insightful meditations about life and death in a declining Yorkshire coastal town. The stories range across the pull of family, a compulsion towards the sea, male mental health, and how we can find sanctuary, humanity and humour in the most unexpected places.

Shortlisted for the Non-Fiction Book of the Year at Scotland's Book of the Year Awards 2022 | In this searing, frank, and funny memoir by the author of When I Had a Little Sister ("A superb memoir" Sunday Times), a crisis causes Catherine Simpson to reflect—and to see how her body tells the story of her life.

Longlisted for the McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Book of the Year 2021 | My name is Haley Cooper Crowe and I am in lockdown in a remote location I can’t tell you about. Haley and Ben live with their mother. But their dad has good reason to believe there’s a new, much deadlier pandemic coming. He’s determined to get them to the safety of his lockdown hideaway. NOW. The only problem is, there is no way their mother will go along with this plan. Kidnapped by their father, they have no contact with the outside world. Can they survive? Will they save their mother? This is one teenage girl’s survival guide for negotiating the collapse of everything she knows – including her family and sanity.

As spring arrives, Stephen Moss’s Somerset garden is awash with birdsong: chiffchaffs, wrens, robins and more. Overhead, buzzards soar, ravens tumble and the season gathers pace. This evocative account underlines how a global crisis changed the way we relate to the natural world, giving us hope for the future. And it puts down a marker for a new normal: when, during that brief but unforgettable spring, nature gave us comfort, hope and joy.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2016 | The year is 1869. A brutal triple murder in a remote community in the Scottish Highlands leads to the arrest of a young man by the name of Roderick Macrae. A memoir written by the accused makes it clear that he is guilty, but it falls to the country’s finest legal and psychiatric minds to uncover what drove him to commit such merciless acts of violence. Was he mad? Only the persuasive powers of his advocate stand between Macrae and the gallows. Graeme Macrae Burnet tells an irresistible and original story about the provisional nature of truth, even when the facts seem clear. His Bloody Project is a mesmerising literary thriller set in an unforgiving landscape where the exercise of power is arbitrary.