To mark the Wigtown book festival, which starts tomorrow, here are 10 of the best books about an area almost unrivalled for landscape and history.

1 A Galloway Childhood, by Ian Niall

A classic of atmospheric recollection, recalling the author's early years when he lived on his grandfather's farm. First published in 1967, it has become probably the best-loved of local memoirs.

2 Cold in the Earth, by Aline Templeton

Also with an agricultural theme, Templeton's detective novel, her first featuring DI Marjory Fleming, is set against the backdrop of the most recent and devastating foot and mouth outbreak. It's a subject rich in fear and loathing.

3 Lucky Poet, by Hugh MacDiarmid

Any book by MacDiarmid would defy convention, and his memoir does not disappoint. Although it describes the way he ate his way through Langholm library as a boy, like a caterpillar through a leaf, it is as full of political and literary ideas as biographical facts. The quote from Margery Allingham with which he prefaces it gives a hint of what follows: "The main thing to remember in autobiography, I have always thought, is not to let any damned modesty creep in to spoil the story."

4 The Lantern Bearers, by Ronald Frame

One of Frame's most delightful novels. Set on the Solway coast, it is the bittersweet tale of a boy singer in the early 1960s, who becomes the muse of a composer, but is dropped when his voice breaks. An elegiac, sensual tale of growing up, told in melancholy hindsight.

5 Dear Alice, by Tom Pow

A collection of poems inspired by Dumfries's infamous lunatic asylum, the Crichton, this is an unsettling piece of imaginative historical reconstruction.

6 After the Armistice Ball, by Catriona McPherson

A lighthearted detective novel, set in 1922, when bored housewife and mother Dandy Gilver steps in to solve the mystery of a body found in a Galloway seaside cottage. One of the charms of the region is that, in places it feels untouched by the modern world and could still be in Gilver's era. That is not a backhanded compliment, but a fulsome one.

7 The Highwayman's Curse, by Nicola Morgan

This gripping children's novel is the tale of highway robbers, Will and Bess, who are on the run from the redcoats. When they fall into smugglers' hands, what follows is a dark and memorable tale whose roots stretch back to the brutal killing days of the Covenanters.

8 Dumfries & Galloway: by John Gifford

Part of the late John Gifford's brilliant Buildings of Scotland series, his architectural companion to this region is an essential traveller's companion, offering pithy details and background to a wealth of houses, castles and buildings.

9 The Kilmarnock Edition, by Robert Burns

Though he was born in Ayrshire, where he found his first publisher, Burns's connections to Dumfries and Galloway were strong. Known in some quarters as Robden of Solway Firth, his time there included his famous period as an exciseman in Dumfries, a physically gruelling position that may have hastened his death.

10 Inside Out: selected poems and translations, and Outside In, selected prose, by Alastair Reid

A son of the manse, who spent Sundays in church on the Isle of Whithorn, watching waves slap the windows, Reid left Scotland as soon as he could, but returned every year to his childhood haunts. These two anthologies collect the best of his lifetime's work which, in poetry, prose and translations, trace the influence of Galloway on the making of this remarkable poet and traveller.