BEST BOOKS FOR...
IF 2020 was a fictional character, how would we say good riddance to it on New Year’s Eve? Drive a stake through its heart then bury it in quicklime? Blast it into outer space?
For some, of course, this will have been a year of wonders: babies have been born, loves kindled, dreams fulfilled. For others who have lost loved ones, it will have been a year of terrible sadness. But for most of us, it’s been a slog.
And we cannot even see it off in style. There will be no New Year’s Eve parties, for which I feel especially sorry for the Scots. Hogmanay can be a bigger deal than Christmas.
I find it so sad to think of Edinburgh without its annual fireworks and thronging crowds. This year, the only sanctioned Hootenanny will be on our screens.
Missing Scotland, which I usually visit at this time of year, I have been reading Scottish novels instead.
This year’s Booker winner, Shuggie
Bain by the Glasgow-raised, U.S.based Douglas Stuart is heartwrenching and deeply moving.
Its backdrop is a 1980s postindustrial Scotland of impoverished housing estates and few prospects. Shuggie is the youngest child of Agnes, who is vivid, funny, glamorous, and gripped by alcoholism.
That sounds bleak, but Shuggie is miraculously-drawn: the fierceness of his love will stay with you.
Lewis Grassic Gibbons’ 1932 novel, Sunset Song, set in the rural northeast, also depicts a hard life in a punishing landscape. But like Shuggie Bain, it has a luminous, steadfast protagonist in Chris Guthrie.
A lighter read is Diana Gabaldon’s time-travelling Outlander, adapted for TV, in which World War II nurse Claire is transported to 18th-century Jacobite Scotland.
American Gabaldon wrote the series’ first novels without visiting Scotland, but the Highland clan communities she conjures feel part of a historical literary world familiar from Scottish classics like Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped.
These are novels to haste ye back. Read with a dram, while humming Auld Lang Syne, and toasting better times ahead.