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LoveReading is thrilled to announce the launch of The Very Short Story Award 2019! If you think you have a story we'll love, click here to find out more and how to enter:
Find out more
LoveReading is thrilled to announce the launch of The Very Short Story Award 2019! If you think you have a story we'll love, click here to find out more and how to enter:
Find out moreLiam McIlvanney was born in Scotland and studied at the universities of Glasgow and Oxford. He has written for numerous publications, including the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement and the Guardian. His debut, Burns the Radical, won the Saltire First Book Award, and his most recent book, Where the Dead Men Go, won the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel. He is Stuart Professor of Scottish Studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand. He lives in Dunedin with his wife and four sons.
A commanding, tenacious, and entirely gripping tale set in Glasgow during 1969. The Quaker kills three women, DI McCormack joins the investigation as it staggers on, will they ever catch the killer? The prologue immediately puts the story into context and firmly sets the time in place. Liam McIlvanney then set an explosion in my path, an unexpected statement took my breath and launched me straight into the heart of the tale. The story spoke to me, I had to keep reading, didn’t want to stop, and so it became a read in one-sitting book for me. There are sections that starkly slapped my awareness, making me sit up and take note. DI McCormack has lodged himself in my mind and I seriously want to see him again! A light shines on the writing, to expose, to highlight the dark grimness that sits within the pages, ensuring ‘The Quaker’ is a powerful, satisfyingly convincing read.
His name fills the streets with fear... In the chilling new crime novel from award-winning author Liam McIlvanney, a serial killer stalks the streets of Glasgow and DI McCormack follows a trail of secrets to uncover the truth... A city torn apart. Glasgow, 1969. In the grip of the worst winter for years, the city is brought to its knees by a killer whose name fills the streets with fear: the Quaker. He takes his next victim - the third woman from the same nightclub - and dumps her in the street like rubbish. A detective with everything to prove. The police are left chasing a ghost, with no new leads and no hope of catching their prey. DI McCormack, a talented young detective from the Highlands, is ordered to join the investigation. But his arrival is met with anger from a group of officers on the brink of despair. Soon he learns just how difficult life can be for an outsider. A killer who hunts in the shadows. When another woman is found murdered in a tenement flat, it's clear the case is by no means over. From ruined backstreets to the dark heart of Glasgow, McCormack follows a trail of secrets that will change the city - and his life - forever...
A commanding, tenacious, and entirely gripping tale set in Glasgow during 1969. The Quaker kills three women, DI McCormack joins the investigation as it staggers on, will they ever catch the killer? The prologue immediately puts the story into context and firmly sets the time in place. Liam McIlvanney then set an explosion in my path, an unexpected statement took my breath and launched me straight into the heart of the tale. The story spoke to me, I had to keep reading, didn’t want to stop, and so it became a read in one-sitting book for me. There are sections that starkly slapped my awareness, making me sit up and take note. DI McCormack has lodged himself in my mind and I seriously want to see him again! A light shines on the writing, to expose, to highlight the dark grimness that sits within the pages, ensuring ‘The Quaker’ is a powerful, satisfyingly convincing read.
His name fills the streets with fear... In the chilling new crime novel from award-winning author Liam McIlvanney, a serial killer stalks the streets of Glasgow and DI McCormack follows a trail of secrets to uncover the truth... A city torn apart. Glasgow, 1969. In the grip of the worst winter for years, the city is brought to its knees by a killer whose name fills the streets with fear: the Quaker. He takes his next victim - the third woman from the same nightclub - and dumps her in the street like rubbish. A detective with everything to prove. The police are left chasing a ghost, with no new leads and no hope of catching their prey. DI McCormack, a talented young detective from the Highlands, is ordered to join the investigation. But his arrival is met with anger from a group of officers on the brink of despair. Soon he learns just how difficult life can be for an outsider. A killer who hunts in the shadows. When another woman is found murdered in a tenement flat, it's clear the case is by no means over. From ruined backstreets to the dark heart of Glasgow, McCormack follows a trail of secrets that will change the city - and his life - forever...
After three years in the wilderness, hardboiled reporter Gerry Conway is back at his desk at the Glasgow Tribune. But three years is a long time on newspapers and things have changed - readers are dwindling, budgets are tightening, and the Trib's once rigorous standards are slipping. Once the paper's star reporter, Conway now plays second fiddle to his former protege, crime reporter Martin Moir. But when Moir goes AWOL as a big story breaks, Conway is dispatched to cover a gangland shooting. And when Moir's body turns up in a flooded quarry, Conway is drawn deeper into the city's criminal underworld as he looks for the truth about his colleague's death. Braving the hostility of gangsters, ambitious politicians and his own newspaper bosses, Conway discovers he still has what it takes to break a big story. But this is a story not everyone wants to hear as the city prepares to host the Commonwealth Games and the country gears up for a make-or-break referendum on independence. In this, the second book in the Conway Trilogy, McIlvanney explores the murky interface of crime and politics in the new Scotland.
There remains at work - in both Britain and America - a group of literary journalists and academics committed to the evaluative criticism of fiction, to a criticism that approaches novels as novels. The Good of the Novel is a collection of specially commissioned essays - edited by Ray Ryan and LIam McIlvanney - on the contemporary Anglophone novel. Bringing together some of the most strenuous and perceptive critics of the present moment and putting them in contact with some of the finest novels of the past three decades, it examines what the novel does and what kinds of truth the novel can tell. What is it that the novel knows? What is it about the language used in a novel that creates a world different from that of drama or poetry? And how does a particular novel emplify this? These questions can be answered by the careful examination of particular great works by strong evaluative critics. Robert Macfarlane on Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty; Tessa Hadley examining Coetzee's Disgrace; and Ian Sansom on Roth's American Pastoral - just some of the essays that are to be found in this insightful, intelligent and illuminating book.
When Glasgow journalist Gerry Conway receives a phone call promising unsavoury information about Scottish Justice Minister Peter Lyons, his instinct is that this apparent scoop won't warrant space in The Tribune. But as Conway's curiosity grows and his leads proliferate, his investigation takes him from Scotland to Belfast. Shocked by the sectarian violence of the past, and by the prejudice and hatred he encounters even now, Conway soon grows obsessed with the story of Lyons and all he represents. And as he digs deeper, he comes to understand that there is indeed a story to be uncovered; and that there are people who will go to great lengths to ensure that it remains hidden. Compelling, vividly written and shocking, ALL THE COLOURS OF THE TOWN is not only the story of an individual and his community - it is also a complex and thrilling inquiry into loyalty, betrayal and duty.
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