As the referendum campaign shifted into high gear, and the same cast of politicians cropped up on our TV screens day after day, journalist Peter Geoghegan was travelling around Scotland soliciting opinions from the types of people who were often overlooked by the news media - and, to be fair, most of the bloggers.

Geoghegan, originally from County Longford in Ireland, had a knack for finding the most revealing places to go, such as Cowdenbeath, in Gordon Brown's constituency, which at one time regularly returned Communists to council seats, but where the last Communist in town had been standing as an Independent for 20 years. Geoghegan also tested the waters of public opinion in the unionist Borders, and in the Western Isles, where many voters objected to the centralising tendencies of the SNP and feared worse after independence.

Beyond Scotland, he travelled to Catalonia, and found a powerful and motivated movement with all the facets of the Scottish campaign turned up to 11 - on both sides. The optimistic and determined Catalan campaign, however, couldn't be a greater contrast to Republika Srpska, a small Bosnian Serb republic which intends to hold its own independence referendum. As in Scotland, he talked to everyone he met along the way, and found the dark flipside of Scotland and Catalonia, with unpleasant ethnic overtones.

In some ways, the best chapter of this book is the first, in which Geoghegan visits Coatbridge, aka "Little Ireland", as this is where identity politics run several layers deeper than elsewhere and the complexities of Scottish self-determination are thrown into the sharpest relief. With a large population of descendants of 19th-century Irish immigrants, Coatbridge has a sizeable republican element who support separation from the British state, but also a significant number of Catholics who have never felt fully accepted in Scotland and worry about an increase in "underlying anti-Irish racism". And they live side by side with the descendants of Ulster Protestants for whom British identity is more important than the question of oil revenues or the prospect of banks moving to London.

Anyone wanting to take stock of the events of 2014 could do worse than to include this book on their reading list. It's a snapshot of the varied shades of opinion in Scotland at the height of its engagement with politics, and highlights how attitudes towards independence were partly moulded by the history and economic conditions of each of its regions.