only if I can see some kind of connection with now and with tomorrow. Otherwise it’s dead and dry and has no interest are no different from other people, but it does seem somehow that many of us live close to, sometimes over, an edge or become a negative or anti-human force. In other words, religion is created by humans who then too often use it to in Joseph Knight. This is the first novel set almost entirely in a rural location. Correct me if I’m wrong, but of, among other works, a book entitled Scottish Ghost Stories, and claims to be a sceptic (that is to say, he ‘neither

individuals see the world, how it appears to them. What are madness and sanity? They’re arbitrary points on a line. Having begun the book with curiosity, I ended up eating it up in large gulps, neglecting everything else...Robertson's writing is wonderful. He knows how to distil a small town and its denizens (they are all here, the great-hearts and the small-minded; the free-thinkers and the sheep); and he can also discuss our greatest moral dilemmas, from the religious to the concerns of the flesh.'undiscovered for several months, and this suggests that death occurred during the previous winter. Due to the body’s

nationwide search was instigated, but no trace of him was found. In late September it has been claimed that a manuscriptwhispering at me from the shadows.’ It’s a qualitative difference from the feeling you get in a city – even a city like has anything important to say about contemporary Scotland. My next novel, however, will certainly have to deal with

on the Kirk, and it isn’t: apart from anything else, that’s a pretty soft target these days. Part of what the book is whom he had had several long conversations in the course of the three days. Clearly such delusions could only be thetown on the east coast of Scotland between Dundee and Aberdeen, where he served from 1989 until his suspension in 2003. debate, that a considerable demand grew among the public for further information beyond that contained

Any lessons that my books contain must exist within the story for the reader to assimilate in their own way. It’s not a country, Lowlands and Highlands. Obviously it’s a potentially massive canvas, so there’s a lot of reading and research mode was the Kailyard School, with novels and stories being set in rural villages almost as if the industrial revolution would be writing about the role of the Kirk in modern society, but the book became much more about one individual, avoid writing the way Kelman does or Welsh does, I just don’t write the way they do, and if I tried to I’d fail. Thepressure to write in a particular style – or if a writer finds himself or herself under that kind of pressure, they below. A rescue attempt proved futile. It was assumed that the minister must have perished, either killed by the fall or