Fifty-something Edinburgh librarian Shona is a proud former pupil of the Marcia Blaine School for Girls, but has a deep loathing for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which she thinks gives her alma mater a bad name. Impeccably educated and an accomplished linguist, mathematician, martial artist, and musician, Shona is selected by Marcia Blaine herself to travel back in time for a crucial mission in Venice.

Finding the city afflicted by what appears to be a new outbreak of the plague, Shona soon encounters the Cornetto family of gondoliers. Lately, a number of their passengers have met a watery fate. Coincidence? Unlikely. She dons a mask, goes undercover and seeks inspiration in the library.

But the mystery only deepens. Why do the Cornettos seem so flaky and their explanations wafer-thin, even as they proclaim their innocence? What is going on at the printworks? Shona’s powers of deduction, dissection and prowess as a swimmer are put to the test as she realises that a bitter feud is at play.

Can Shona unravel the tapestry of lies and get to the truth? It’s a race against time, but it would be a mistake to underestimate a librarian.

“If you have been still enough for long enough, your eyes will have attuned and begun to read the sea-surge fluently, so you recognize the blunt curve and flourished tail of a diving otter. Home your eyes in on that portion of the sea, permit nothing else to move, and you will see the otter eel-catching, resurfacing.”

It is a special privilege and a richly rewarding experience to observe a wild animal hunting, interacting with its young or its mate, exploring its habitat, or escaping a predator.

To watch wildlife, it’s essential not only to learn an animal’s ways, the times and places you may find it, but also to look inward: to station yourself, focus, and wait. The experience depends on your stillness, silence, and full attention, watching and listening with minimal movement and if possible staying downwind so that your presence is not sensed.

With decades of close observation of wild animals and birds, Jim Crumley has found himself up close and personal with many of our most elusive creatures, studying their movements, noting details, and offering intimate insights into their extraordinary lives. Here, he draws us into his magical world, showing how we can learn to watch wildlife well, and what doing so can mean for our ability to care for it, and care for ourselves.

This book is part of the IN THE MOMENT collection of books exploring themes of mindfulness and being present in our activities and environment. The first six, out now or forthcoming soon, are pictured here.

Do you sometimes wake from dreaming with an unease you find difficult to shake? Is there one recurring nightmare that haunts you? Or do dreams bring you welcome relief from your waking life?

We spend around a third of our lives asleep, so it’s understandable that dreams have been intriguing and troubling humans for millennia. Some believe our dreams to be an expression of hidden desires, a cathartic release for our unconscious mind, or even crucial insights or predictions we can’t access while awake. Whatever their functions, our dreams are worth paying attention to. Yet with the demands and diversions of each day, it can be hard to find time to reflect on them.

This compact volume approaches dreaming with a mindful eye, asking us to spend time reflecting on our dreams to help us decipher their secrets and discover what our nighttime unconscious could reveal about our daily lives, needs and desires.

Interpreting Dreams is both an invitation to pay more attention to our dreams, and a toolkit for unlocking their hidden meanings. By bringing awareness to the time we spend dreaming, we can learn to become more present and fulfilled in our daily lives, and perhaps even alleviate some of our most persistent anxieties.

This book is part of the IN THE MOMENT collection of books exploring themes of mindfulness and being present in our activities and environment. The first six, out now or forthcoming soon, are pictured here.

Revered across the globe as an author of compelling novels, journalism and essays that came to define the twentieth century, George Orwell was an unmatched political visionary, shining a light on the insidious nature of propaganda. Yet this chronicler of war, social injustices and urban poverty spent his later years living in a rustic and remote farmhouse, miles from the nearest neighbour. His rural escape was on the Hebridean island of Jura – another paradox, given that he harboured a deep-seated prejudice against Scotland for much of his life.

In 1946, Orwell arrived at his isolated home of Barnhill as a grieving widower living in the shadow of war and the nuclear threat. It was there he wrote his masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Beyond the writing desk, he was transformed: his new life was one of natural beauty and tight-knit community – and he grew to love a corner of the world he had once dismissed.

Orwell’s Island casts important new light on a great modern thinker and author. No previous biography has revealed so much about Orwell’s later years or his time on Jura, despite this being where he created Big Brother, the Thought Police and Room 101—creations still in common currency today.

Peat and Whisky: The Unbreakable Bond is, as one of the best-known aficionados attests, “among the most important books about whisky ever written.” Part travelogue, part popular science, and a love letter to Scotland’s most famous artisan product, Mike Billett’s account brings together landscapes, geology, ecology, history, people and their whisky, whilst also addressing an important current environmental issue: peatlands and their role in climate change.

The story of peat and its central role in the production and flavour of whisky is engagingly related through the author’s journey around Scotland and into its past – in ancient peatlands and bogs and the places where whisky has been made for centuries. It sheds light on a country and its history, especially through an oft-misunderstood component of the production of whisky. It looks back to a golden age of peat and whisky, as well as forward to a more challenging future.

As our natural resources and landscapes are increasingly contested, this is the essential read for all whisky lovers.

“Horror opened me up to new possibilities for survival … I saw power in freakery and transgression and wondered if it could be mine.” 

The relationship between horror films and the LGBTQ+ community? It’s complicated. Haunted houses, forbidden desires and the monstrous can have striking resonance for those who’ve been marginalised. But the genre’s murky history of an alarmingly heterosexual male gaze, queer-coded villains and sometimes blatant homophobia, is impossible to overlook. There is tension here, and there are as many queer readings of horror films as there are queer people.

Edited by Joe Vallese, and with contributions by writers including Kirsty Logan and Carmen Maria Machado, the essays in It Came from the Closet bring the particulars of the writers’ own experiences, whether in relation to gender, sexuality, or both, to their unique interpretations of horror films from Jaws to Jennifer’s Body.

Exploring a multitude of queer experiences from first kisses and coming out to transition and parenthood, this is a varied and accessible collection that leans into the fun of horror while taking its cultural impact and reciprocal relationship to the LGBTQ+ community seriously.

Rising on Lancashire’s Heald Moor, the River Calder flows through the glorious countryside of West Yorkshire until it joins the River Aire, near Castleford. Its often steep-sided valley was formed by glacial erosion of a bedrock of millstone grit and carboniferous rock, over the course of millions of years. Rich in biodiversity, the valley is home to a wonderful variety of birds, animals, trees and wildflowers. Together they form a beautiful backdrop for residents and visitors to enjoy this green sanctuary, where it’s easy to forget the world beyond.

With more than its fair share of rainfall, the valley’s rushing river was central to the industrial heyday of the Pennines, when the waterway was modified with “cuts” to form a navigable canal. The legacy of the textile industry is seen in the remaining mill and factory buildings. Today, renovated mills are popular as dwellings, and the canal is a place of leisure, where boaters, walkers and cyclists can enjoy nature’s sights and sounds.

Winner of The Gilpin Hotel Prize for Fiction at the 2024 Lakeland Book Awards 

In an old-fashioned fishing community on windswept Morecambe Bay, change is imperceptibly slow. Treacherous tides sweep the quicksands, claiming everything in their path. As a small boy, Arthur had naturally followed in his father’s and grandfather’s footprints, learning to read the currents and shifting sands.Now retired and widowed, though, Arthur feels tired, invisible, redundant. His daughter wants him safely tucked in a home. No one listens to his rants about the ill-prepared newcomers striking out nightly onto the bay for cockles, seemingly oblivious to the danger.When Arthur’s path crosses Suling’s, both are almost out of options. Barely yet an adult, Suling’s hopes for a better life have given way to fear: she’s without papers or money, speaks no English, and debt collectors are hunting her down. Her only choice is to trust the old man.Combining warmth and tension and recalling a true incident, The Bay tells a tender story about loneliness, confronting prejudice, and the comfort of friendship, however unlikely—as well as exposing one of the most pressing social ills of our age.

“Evocative, muscular.” – Kathleen Jamie.

Karen Lloyd takes us on a deeply personal journey around the 60 miles of coastline that make up ‘nature’s amphitheatre’.

Embarking on a series of walks that take in beguiling landscapes and ever-changing seascapes, Karen tells the stories of the places, people, wildlife and history of Morecambe Bay. So we meet the King’s Guide to the Sands, discover forgotten caves and islands that don’t exist, and delight in the simple beauty of an oystercatcher winging its way across the ebbing tide.

As we walk with Karen, she explores her own memories of the bay, making an unwitting pilgrimage through her own past and present, as well as that of the bay. The result is a singular and moving account of one of Britain’s most alluring coastal areas.

Inhabiting a landscape, walking a landscape, writing a place and time…

For Linda Cracknell, exposure to wind, rock, mist, and salt water is integral to her writing process. She follows Susan Sontag’s advice to “Love words, agonise over sentences, and pay attention to the world,” observing and writing her landscapes from the particulars of each moment.

In this varied essay collection, Linda backpacks on a small island that is connected to the mainland only at low tide. In winter snow, she hikes the wooded hillside close to her home, a place she is intimately familiar with in all seasons. And she retraces over three days the steps of a trek made by her parents seven decades earlier. She explores her inspirations, in nature and from other artists and their work, and she offers thoughtful writing prompts.

Reading this collection will take you to new places, open your eyes to the world, and suggest ways to take note and make notes as you go—to inspire your own attentive looking, journaling, and writing practice.

This book is part of the IN THE MOMENT collection of books exploring themes of mindfulness and being present in our activities and environment. The first six, out now or forthcoming soon, are pictured here.