“Eerie, engrossing … The author skilfully sifts through the secrets harboured in homes and haunting the heart … The tension between concealing and revealing utterly grips”

“Joan of Arc and Christine de Pizan are reimagined in a post-apocalyptic dystopia, in this compellingly ambitious examination of gender, semiotics and warfare … The narrative mode is to show through dramatic, often moving scenes, and then to tell, reflecting on them analytically. This disjunction can be jarring, but it’s knowingly done, because the book’s style is itself a theme”

“ALAN Parks is an amiable bear of a man who these days spends his time wandering around Glasgow thinking up ways to murder people. No, don’t worry. His criminal activities are purely fictional. Parks is that not-so-rare thing these days, a Scottish crime writer. His first novel Bloody January is out now”

“When I started writing Bloody January I wanted to write about Glasgow and I wanted to write a book about the different kind of people who lived there in the early seventies. A crime story seemed to be the best way to explore the different levels of society, from homeless people living on the streets to the landed Gentry in their huge houses in the country … So I ended up writing a ‘Tartan Noir’. Definition seems to be pretty broad but mostly they are novels set in Scotland containing some element of crime in the plot. Here are five of my favourites”