2026 has been a great year for Scottish books, and this is my round-up of the best books of 2026 from Scotland.
Whether you are looking for a book for a crime fan, a cyclist or a hillwalker, for the nieces and nephews, or for your dad who loves history, there is something for everyone.
My best Scottish books of 2026 are sorted into fiction, crime, travel guides, history and places, hill walking, cycling, wild swimming, nature writing, photography, art, food and drink, poetry and children’s books, with the ones I’d buy first starred as favourites.
The books here are part of my sustainable Scottish Christmas gift guide, which has nearly 190 gifts made in Scotland.
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The best Scottish fiction books 2026 11
↑ Back to filtersNew Scottish novels: the Booker-shortlisted John of John, Alexander McCall Smith on Lewis, a Darien novella from Val McDermid, Graeme Macrae Burnet on Benbecula and Damian Barr's Two Roberts. Fiction set in Scotland or written by Scots, published in 2026.
If you’d rather buy in person, see my map of the best independent bookshops in Scotland.
The Isle of Good Karma
£18.99Alexander McCall Smith, Polygon
Maeve Macdonald has taught at the same school on Lewis for twenty years when she packs it in for Nepal. Gentle, funny and exactly what you want to read between Christmas and New Year.
Newes of Witches
£16.99Mairi Kidd, Black & White
Rural Scotland, 1629. Children are going missing in the bogs and the oat fields, a serving girl is locked up on suspicion of witchcraft, and Mòrag, the healer and midwife, sets out to find what's really happening in the glen before the fear does its work. Mairi Kidd wrote The Specimens, the Burke and Hare novel, and this is the same mix of history and dread, with the witch trials as the backdrop.
John of John
£20Douglas Stuart, Picador
The big Scottish novel of the year, shortlisted for the Booker. Cal Macleod comes home to Harris after art school, broke, caught between his Presbyterian weaver father and his Glaswegian granny as the island starts to come apart.
Val McDermid and Jo Sharp, Polygon
A wee hardback from Polygon's Darkland Tales series, in which Scottish writers retell moments from our history. Val McDermid and the geographer Jo Sharp take on the Darien Scheme, the doomed colony in Panama that bankrupted Scotland, through the letters of the expedition's scientist.
Shona MacLean, Quercus
From the author of The Bookseller of Inverness. A year in Cromarty in 1831, where a circulating library draws together a laird's wife, a minister's wife and a schoolmaster with secrets as cholera and emigration reach the Black Isle. A big historical novel to disappear into over the holidays.
The Repentants
£18.99Kate Foster, Mantle
St Monans, Fife, 1790: two shamed women, a merchant's wife and a salt serf, are shipped to Iceland under a real scheme by Scottish merchants to turn the island into a prison. From the author of The Maiden, which was longlisted for the Women's Prize.
Tom Newlands, Phoenix
Frazer and Caitlin raise their autistic son in a mouldy flat in a small grey Scottish new town, short of money and short of sleep, and somehow it's a love story. The follow-up to Only Here, Only Now, and just as tender.
The Loch of the Bees
£10.99Donald S. Murray, Saraband
Interlinked Hebridean stories from the eighth century to today, around a beehive shelter on a tiny island, from the author of As the Women Lay Dreaming.
The Two Roberts
£9.99Damian Barr, Canongate
Shortlisted for the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year, which is decided on 18 November. Two boys meet at Glasgow School of Art in the 1930s and become the painters Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, lovers and collaborators who took London by storm and were forgotten. Damian Barr brings them back, and it's under a tenner from Canongate in Edinburgh.
Benbecula
£8.99Graeme Macrae Burnet, Polygon
From the author of His Bloody Project. Based on a real triple murder on Benbecula in 1857 and told by a shunned islander who isn't sure of his own mind. Shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize.
This Bright Life
£9.99Karen Campbell, Canongate
Gerard is twelve, clever, cycles everywhere with his gang the Broncos, and looks after his wee brother and sister because nobody else does. One April morning in Glasgow he makes a mistake that takes him away from them, and his story crosses with Margaret, a widow holding on to her routines, and Claire, newly divorced and new to the street. Shortlisted for the Saltire awards; new in paperback this year.
The best Scottish crime books 2026 6
↑ Back to filtersThis year's Tartan Noir: Scotland's crime book of the year from a Glasgow grandmother, Louise Welsh's Rilke back after twenty years, the last of the Ally McCoist trilogy and the daftest series in Scottish fiction.
A Bad, Bad Place
£16.99Frances Crawford, Bantam
Scotland's crime book of the year, from a Glasgow grandmother who started writing in her sixties. Possilpark, 1979: twelve-year-old Janey finds a hardman's daughter dead on the old railway line, and her granny Maggie has secrets of her own. It won the McIlvanney Prize and the Bloody Scotland Debut Prize in September, the first book ever to take both.
Boyhood
£23David Keenan, White Rabbit
Opens with a boy's abduction outside a Glasgow football ground in 1979. Nine years on his brother Aaron is guided by an angel through visions that run from wartime Paris to the Troubles and 1980s Mexico City and back to Glasgow. The Herald called it a psychedelic post-punk fantasia; Irvine Welsh called it a complete triumph.
The Cut Up
£16.99Louise Welsh, Canongate
Rilke is back. More than twenty years after The Cutting Room, Louise Welsh returns to her Glasgow auctioneer, who runs Bowery Auctions, where nobody asks where the goods came from. An old acquaintance gets out of prison, a customer dies on the premises, and Rilke's friends help in the way that makes everything worse. The third Rilke novel; you don't need to have read the others, though you'll want to afterwards.
Rat Race
£16.99Callum McSorley, Pushkin Vertigo
The last book in the DCI Ally McCoist trilogy, which started with Squeaky Clean and the 2023 McIlvanney Prize. A gangland massacre, a memory stick full of crypto and a Russian crime gang in Glasgow.
The Ending Writes Itself
£16.99Evelyn Clarke, HQ
Six midlist authors on a private Scottish island compete to finish a dead novelist's book in seventy-two hours. Evelyn Clarke turned out to be V.E. Schwab and Edinburgh's Cat Clarke writing together, which was revealed at Bloody Scotland.
Olga Wojtas, Saraband
The daftest, cleverest series in Scottish fiction. A Morningside librarian is sent back to Edinburgh in 1788, framed for a crime, and has to deal with Robert Burns and a teenage Walter Scott. Waterstones' Scottish Book of the Month in August.
The best Scottish travel guides 2026 7
↑ Back to filtersGuidebooks for anyone planning a Scottish trip in 2027: the new official North Coast 500 guide and its eating and sleeping companion, the latest Rough Guides, Bradt's heritage weekends and thirty dog-friendly breaks.
Emma Gibbs with Collins Maps, Collins
The fully revised official guide, with new places and new photography, arranged by beaches, historic sites, wildlife and the off-the-beaten-track bits. Hardback and photo-led. Read it alongside my slow guide to the North Coast 500.
Highlands2Hammocks, Collins
The practical companion, updated this spring by Campbell and Gemma, the Scottish van-life couple, with what3words locations, dog-friendly and EV-charging details for every stop.
Norm Longley, Rough Guides
The eleventh edition, fully updated this year. Hotels, hostels, ferries, walks and the new distilleries, for anyone planning a 2027 trip.
Helen and Neil Matthews, Bradt
New from Bradt on 12 November: more than twenty-five heritage short breaks, from Edinburgh and St Andrews to Orkney and Skye, with where to stay and eat.
Lottie Gross, Bradt
Thirty short breaks with the dog, from the Hebrides and Orkney to Shetland and the NC500. The author isn't Scottish, but the research is thorough and it's the only book of its kind.
Jack and Meg Gillett, Crowood
A visitor's guide to eight west-coast islands: Arran, Cumbrae, Islay, Lismore, Mull, Skye, Tiree and Lewis and Harris. Useful for planning an island-hopping summer.
Norm Longley, Rough Guides
Portree to Trotternish, then Lewis, Harris, the Uists and Barra in a pocket guide with a soft-touch cover and a free ebook. The pocket North Coast 500 edition (£9.99) is the same size.
The best books about Scottish islands, history and landscape 2026 5
↑ Back to filtersBooks about the place itself: the Small Isles and Raasay, holy wells and whirlpools, and why Scotland looks the way it does, from the geology up.
Alan McKirdy, John Gordon and Roger Crofts, Birlinn
Why does Scotland look the way it does? The new edition of the classic on our geology and landforms, with freshly commissioned illustrations, explains the mountains, lochs, islands and beaches you've been photographing.
John Hunter, Birlinn
Eigg, Muck, Canna and Rum, from Iron Age forts to the Clearances and the sporting estates, by the man who wrote the Historic Environment Scotland guide to the islands. The book to read on the ferry from Mallaig.
Liquid Faith
£10.99Ian Bradley, Birlinn
A journey round Scotland's holy wells, healing springs, sacred lochs and whirlpools and the legends attached to them, by the Church of Scotland minister who wrote The Coffin Roads. Travel writing with a good dose of folklore.
Roger Hutchinson, Birlinn
Raasay from the hunter-gatherers to the community buy-out and the new distillery, from the author of Calum's Road. The island where Calum built his road, by the man who told that story.
Richard D. Oram, Birlinn
An environmental history of Scotland from the retreat of the ice twelve thousand years ago to now: how climate, weather, disease and people have shaped the land, the water and the wildlife, by the professor of environmental history at Stirling. Serious and handsome.
The best Scottish hill walking and climbing books 2026 9
↑ Back to filtersNew guides for the hills: the Hughs and the Corbetts, Cicerone's Skye Munros, the updated SMC Skye Scrambles, the meanings of Scottish hill names, St Cuthbert's Way, Arran walks and the great mixed climbs.
compiled by Rab Anderson, Scottish Mountaineering Press
All 222 Corbetts with recommended routes, link-ups, maps and new photography, published last December and completing the set with the Munros and the Grahams and Donalds books. The definitive Corbett book.
Peter Drummond, Scottish Mountaineering Press
The new, expanded edition of the book that tells you what Beinn Alligin and Suilven mean and how to say them, with Gaelic, Norse and Pictish origins and the old map spellings.
Peter Edwards, Pocket Mountains
The classic £6.99 pocket guide, new this year, with forty Arran walks all reachable by public transport. Pocket Mountains also brought out a new Aviemore and the Cairngorms guide at the same price.
edited by Guy Robertson and Hamish Frost, Scottish Mountaineering Press
Published last October, so not strictly a 2026 book, but it won the climbing literature prize at Banff this year and the photography of Scottish winter climbing is extraordinary.
The Hughs, Volumes 1 and 2
£14.99 eachAndrew Dempster, Luath
The Hughs are Scotland's wee hills under 2,000 feet with attitude, the ones most people drive past on the way to a Munro. Volume 1 covers the mainland, Volume 2, out this year, a hundred island hills from the Hebrides to Shetland, both with colour photos and sketch maps.
Skye Munros
£19.95Adrian Trendall, Cicerone
A two-volume set, a planning book and a lightweight route book, covering all twelve Cuillin Munros and the Inaccessible Pinnacle, with Harvey maps. By the man who runs All Things Cuillin guiding.
Skye Scrambles
£27.50Noel Williams, Scottish Mountaineering Press
The third, fully revised edition of the SMC guide to walks, scrambles and easy climbs on Skye, with more than thirty new routes and the Trotternish Ridge and Main Ridge Traverse.
Katie Featherstone, Cicerone
Forty-three graded walks in the national park, including all twenty-one Munros, from lochside strolls to The Cobbler and Ben Lui, in a new edition this March.
Ron Shaw, Birlinn
The fourth edition of the official guide to the sixty-mile pilgrim route from Melrose to Holy Island, with a new Nicolson folding map in a weatherproof wallet.
The best Scottish cycling books 2026 4
↑ Back to filtersThe first Lost Lanes book for Scotland, twenty-five classic road rides, the hardest climbs and fifteen gravel routes from Edinburgh.
Lost Lanes Scotland
£18.99Jack Thurston, Wild Things
Jack Thurston's Lost Lanes books have been sending cyclists down the quiet roads of England and Wales for a decade, and this is the first one for Scotland: forty rides on back roads and gravel tracks from the Highlands to the Borders, with the pubs, cafés, wild swims and places to stay along the way, and photographs that make you want to go now.
Markus Stitz, Vertebrate
Fifteen gravel routes from 17 to 89 kilometres around the capital, plus a 244-kilometre challenge, with OS maps, GPX files and café stops for every ride. Markus Stitz is Edinburgh's best-known bikepacker, and these are the roads and tracks he rides from his own front door.
Dave Barter, Vertebrate
Twenty-five classic road routes, from Glen Lyon to the Wall of Talla and Skye, in a large-format book with maps, profiles and GPX files. From the author of Great British Bike Rides.
Simon Warren, Vertebrate
The 100 Climbs man's pocket guide to Scotland's hardest road climbs, Bealach na Bà, The Lecht and the Wall of Talla among them, updated for 2026 with new photography and the stats. Pocket-sized.
The best Scottish wild swimming and sauna books 2026 3
↑ Back to filtersA woman who set out to swim a thousand lochs, a seasonal guide to cold water and forest, and the first book about Scotland's wild sauna boom.
The Wild Fix Scotland
£16.99Anna Deacon, Black & White
Wild swimming, forest bathing and seasonal living, arranged by water, fire, earth and air, with Anna Deacon's photography. From the photographer behind The Art of Wild Swimming.
Brigid Lowe, Elliott & Thompson
When her life unravels, Brigid Lowe sets out to swim a thousand Scottish lochs: mountain pools, sea caves, springs and the big cold lochs of the Highlands, with the myths that go with them.
Hannah Mary Goodlad, Birlinn
Wild saunas have appeared on beaches and lochsides all over Scotland in the last few years and this is the first book about them: island sweathouses, mountainside builds and the Nordic and Celtic roots of it all.
The best Scottish nature writing and memoirs 2026 10
↑ Back to filtersThis year's Scottish nature writing and memoir: a Wainwright Prize winner from Orkney, a Highland glen, a minister turned shepherd, forty-eight Highland cows on a Hebridean croft, three brothers rowing the Pacific and the argument over Scotland's deer.
Wild Knowing
£16.99Fiona Ross, Black & White
Fiona Ross grew up in Glasgow and was handed a leather-bound ledger of her family's nineteenth-century Highland cattle fold. She took the hint, moved with her husband and two dogs to a croft on a Hebridean island and built a fold of forty-eight Highland cows of her own. Morning swims in the Atlantic, escaped heifers, calves born in the dark and the ghosts of the Clearances in the next field.
Cal Flyn, William Collins
Orkney-based Cal Flyn won this year's Wainwright Prize for Conservation Writing with this, and it's on the Saltire non-fiction shortlist too. Eleven of the world's remotest wildernesses and the people who live in them.
Kapka Kassabova, Jonathan Cape
A Highland glen, its people, who owns it, who left and who is trying to stay, from the author of Elixir and Border. It divided the critics.
Victoria Bennett, Elliott & Thompson
A year turning a scrappy Orkney back garden into a wild apothecary garden, part memoir and part herbal almanac, with teas, tinctures and island folklore month by month.
Whistlebare
£14.99Helen Percy, Luath
A Church of Scotland minister becomes a hill shepherd. Helen Percy's memoir of mist, dogs, an orphaned duckling and a landscape under threat is funny and heartbreaking, and the lead autumn book from Luath in Edinburgh.
Symphonic
£12.99Jim Crumley, Saraband
Jim Crumley, Scotland's best-known nature writer, on sixty years of watching the wild and what the land has been trying to tell us. A small hardback.
In the Company of Sheep
£12.99Polly Pullar, Birlinn
Conservationist and shepherd Polly Pullar on sheep, crofters, native breeds and what grazing does to a landscape, from Dartmoor to Shetland. Give it with Whistlebare.
Mike Daniels, Birlinn
Inside the long argument over deer numbers, rewilding, fencing and who gets to hunt. If you walk the Highlands and wonder why the hills look the way they do, this explains it.
Ewan, Jamie and Lachlan Maclean, Canongate
Three Scottish brothers rowed the Pacific non-stop and unsupported, 9,753 miles from Peru to Australia in 139 days, six million oar strokes and a world record. A few years earlier they'd never rowed. This is what it did to their bodies and to each other, and the million pounds it raised for clean water through their foundation.
Alycia Pirmohamed, Canongate
The book that won the Nan Shepherd Prize for new voices in nature writing. Alycia Pirmohamed grew up a young Muslim woman on the Canadian prairies, bonded to a landscape she wasn't allowed to belong to, and the pieces here move between Canada, East Africa, the Pacific Northwest and Scotland, where she now lives.
The best Scottish photography books 2026 5
↑ Back to filtersBig, beautiful books about Scotland: a collector's edition of a hundred legendary places, Victorian glass-plate photographs of the islands, the Cairngorms, Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Sarah Clark, Rough Guides
A collector's edition hardback with sprayed edges: Edinburgh, Glasgow, Glen Coe, Rannoch Moor, Skye, the Hebrides, Orkney, Shetland and the castles and abbeys in between. Glossy armchair travel.
Andy Howard, Vertebrate
Award-winning wildlife and landscape photography from the national park, back in print this autumn, with a foreword by Cameron McNeish.
Glasgow in Photographs
£19.99David Collie, Amberley
Full-page photography of the city, its murals, statues and night scenes, with a foreword by Dame Katherine Grainger. If you know a Glaswegian who has moved away, post them this.
Lesley Ferguson, Historic Environment Scotland
Glass-plate photographs from the 1870s to 1919 of Western Isles blackhouses, Highland crofts, Argyll castles and Fife harbours, reissued this spring.
Times Books and Magnus Linklater, Collins
A hundred images of the capital from The Times archive, landmarks, festivals and everyday life, with an endorsement from Alexander McCall Smith.
The best Scottish art and architecture books 2026 3
↑ Back to filtersThe Colourists, Goudie's Tam o' Shanter paintings in a new edition and the award-winning survey of Art Deco Scotland.
Alice Strang, National Galleries of Scotland
Peploe, Fergusson, Hunter and Cadell in 120 illustrations, with new research on their lives and friendships. Published by the National Galleries, so the money stays with the collection.
Robert Burns, paintings by Alexander Goudie, Birlinn
Burns's poem with Goudie's famous cycle of paintings, in a new edition with essays by Alan Riach and the artist's son Lachlan Goudie. An art book and a Burns Night in one.
Bruce Peter, Historic Environment Scotland
The award-winning survey of Scotland's Art Deco villas, cinemas, factories and seaside pavilions, by Bruce Peter of Glasgow School of Art, with the photographs to match.
The best Scottish food and drink books 2026 6
↑ Back to filtersCookbooks and whisky books from Scotland: the Hebridean Baker's Christmas book, Jess Elliott Dennison's self-published Edinburgh cookbooks, Scran, Pam Brunton of Inver on modern Scottish food, a tour of the island distilleries and the first book devoted to blended Scotch.
Whiskies Galore
£12.99Ian Buxton, Birlinn
The island-by-island whisky travelogue, updated this year for the new distilleries on Benbecula, Islay, Orkney, Shetland and Tiree. Whisky and islands in one book, which covers a lot of people on my list.
Coinneach MacLeod, Black & White
Scotland's bestselling baker does Christmas: festive bakes, Hogmanay puddings, gin and tonic truffles, clementine margaritas and Hebridean crafts for the long dark evenings. Published on 5 November.
Elliott's cookbooks
From £23.50Jess Elliott Dennison, Elliott's
Jess writes, tests and publishes these cookbooks herself from her studio on Sciennes Road in Edinburgh. Midweek Recipes came first, then Weekend Recipes, and this August brought Vegetable Recipes – I love the leeks vinaigrette, fennel and onion bhajis and the courgette lasagne. There is a wee Biscuits book on pre-order too.
Scran
£27Ali Stoner, Hamlyn
More than a hundred Scottish recipes with a modern twist from Ali Stoner, better known as the Roving Haggis: Scottish eggs Benedict, a Balmoral sausage roll, proper tablet. One of the Scotsman's cookbooks of the autumn.
Between Two Waters
£10.99Pam Brunton, Canongate
The chef behind Inver on Loch Fyne asks whether there is such a thing as modern Scottish food, and goes looking for it from the soil up: the restaurant's early years, the food industry she spent four years campaigning against, and why a shared meal matters. It won the Fortnum & Mason award and was a Financial Times book of the year. New in paperback this year.
Charles MacLean, Hans Offringa and Dave Broom, Birlinn
Published on 5 November, the first book devoted entirely to blended Scotch, which is what most of the world drinks. Three of the biggest names in whisky writing on the history, the blending houses and how to taste it, with hundreds of photographs. Pair it with a bottle.
The best Scottish poetry books 2026 3
↑ Back to filtersThree collections: the former Makar's selected poems, the Edinburgh Makar's Saltire-shortlisted new book and a verse novel set in Assynt.
Selected Poems 1991-2026
£14.99Jackie Kay, Picador
Three decades of the former Makar, from The Adoption Papers to May Day.
Everything Everyday
£10.99Hannah Lavery, Polygon
The Edinburgh Makar's new collection, shortlisted for the Saltire Poetry Book of the Year, which is decided on 18 November.
The best Scottish children's books 2026 6
↑ Back to filtersScottish books for children: the tenth-anniversary Nowhere Emporium, Secret Agent Nessie and the Scots-language picture books that are half the fun to read aloud.
The Snawman
£7.99Raymond Briggs, Scots by Matthew Fitt, Itchy Coo
The Snowman in Scots, with the pictures from the film. Itchy Coo's Scots editions are the ones I love best, and reading them aloud is half the fun.
The Gruffalo's Wean
£6.99Julia Donaldson, Scots by James Robertson, Itchy Coo
The Gruffalo's Child in Scots: the wee one ignores her faither and sneaks out into the snow. The best voices in the house will come out for this one.
Ross MacKenzie, Kelpies
The magical shop that appears in Glasgow, ten years on, in a new illustrated hardback with a die-cut doorway on the cover. For eight to twelves, from the Edinburgh children's publisher.
Luath Press
A wee owl who can't fly, in braid Scots, from the Edinburgh publisher. For reading aloud to the under-sixes.
The 12 Days o Yule
£7.99Birlinn
The Christmas song retold in Scots as a picture book, from the independent Edinburgh publisher. Try singing it on Christmas Eve.
Secret Agent Nessie
£7.99Gary Chudleigh and Laura Howell, Kelpies
A full-colour graphic novel for six-and-ups in which Nessie takes on chip-stealing seagulls. Published this spring by Edinburgh's Floris Books.
Where to buy Scottish books
You can buy books direct from our Scottish publishers – Birlinn and Polygon in Edinburgh, Canongate, Luath, Saraband in Glasgow, the Scottish Mountaineering Press – and buying direct supports our publishing industry.
For everything else, you can find your closest bookshop on my map of independent bookshops in Scotland.
Browse this year’s guide to gifts made in Scotland at my sustainable Scottish Christmas gift guide.
Happy reading!
Kate – Love from Scotland x
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