The Last Wolf
David Shaw Mackenzie (ThunderPoint, £9.99)
The Last Wolf starts with a scene so nail-bitingly tense that you’re left wondering where it can possibly go from there. Surprising his wife and her lover in the act, the gamekeeper of Swordale Estate on the Island of Glass marches the man naked, at gunpoint, into town for a public execution. Up at Swordale Castle, old Major Redburn and his son disagree on how to handle the situation. Not that this is anything new, as none of the Redburn family seem to like or approve of each other very much. Mackenzie traces their uneasy truce back a generation, visiting Paris in the 1920s and Capri in 1931, peeling back the Redburns’ code of silence layer by layer to reveal the source of the 40-year animosity between the Major and his brother. Featuring a cast of distinct, well-drawn characters all looking at the same events from their own differing perspectives, Mackenzie’s third novel is an engrossing and well-crafted tale.
It’s Only A Joke, Comrade!
Jonathan Waterlow (CreateSpace, £14.99)
To breathtaking effect, Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin tapped into the relentlessly dark humour to be found in the USSR at its paranoid peak. Now, Jonathan Waterlow has picked up the baton, exploring the kind of jokes that flourished in Soviet society to help people cope with the uncertainty and despair of living under an authoritarian regime where reality could change overnight. Tracing how traditional strands of Russian humour adapted to the new era, he discovers that the country couldn’t be neatly split into believers and dissidents. Most citizens were somewhere in between, and making sense of that grey area is what excites Waterlow, particularly when the official version and personal experience intersected and engaged with each other. Thanks to the records of a Soviet Commission on satire, he can tell us what the regime thought of the jokers too. Waterlow provides insight into a people who, more than 25 years after the collapse of the USSR, still remain an enigma.
Who Built Scotland
Various (Historic Environment Scotland, £9.99)
Five writers (Kathleen Jamie, Alexander McCall Smith, James Robertson, Alistair Moffat and James Crawford) spread out across Scotland to record their impressions of 25 buildings which have all played a part in the nation’s story. In these absorbing pieces, we can see the country we know taking shape with the constructions of Glasgow Cathedral, Edinburgh Castle and Charlotte Square. Some later entries are less obvious, such as Glenlivet Distillery, Hampden Park and the Sullom Voe terminal, and allow for more of a personal slant. But the early pieces convey a sense of awe as the contributors lament the passing of the Picts while gazing upon their standing stones, muse over what the panoramic view from Cairnpapple Hill would mean to hunter-gatherers or consider the faint traces left on the landscape by countless later generations of hard-working people. There will inevitably be quibbles about the selection of buildings, but the upside is that it could be a good excuse for 25 more.
ALASTAIR MABBOTT
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