Obsessed by the details of what he has come to call The Case, he is sure that the man convicted of the atrocity was not responsible, and that he himself has thus been deprived not only of justice but also of any chance of escape from his enduring grief. Twenty-one years after his wife and daughter were murdered in the bombing of a plane over Scotland, Alan Tealing, a university lecturer, still does not know the truth of what really happened on that terrible night. James has published four previous novels: THE FANATIC JOSEPH KNIGHT, which won the Scottish Book of the Year Award and the Saltire Prize THE TESTAMENT OF GIDEON MACK was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and has sold more than 250,000 copies in the United Kingdom and finally, AND THE LAND LAY STILL, which won the Saltire Prize. He has also edited many books including the SELECTED POEMS of Robert Fergusson, and two books by the 19th-century geologist and folklorist Hugh Miller. James published a second book of stories, THE RAGGED MAN’S COMPLAINT (1993), a collection of poems, SOUND-SHADOW (1995) and SCOTTISH GHOST STORIES (1996) before co-compiling the DICTIONARY OF SCOTTISH QUOTATIONS in 1996. He also founded the pamphlet-publishing imprint Kettillonia and is general editor of the Scots language educational imprint Itchy Coo. After publishing his first collection of stories, CLOSE (Black & White Publishing) in 1991, James was appointed writer-in-residence at Brownsbank Cottage, the Lanarkshire home of the poet Hugh MacDiarmid. He studied history at Edinburgh, at both under-graduate and post-graduate levels. Suggests that Robertson's first novel, chiefly concerned with 17th century Scotland, already shows the complex intertextual relationships with earlier Scottish works by Scott, Hogg, and Stevenson that marks his subsequent writing, and comments particularly on its question "What happens later?," in relation to the Scottish vote for political devolution in May 1997.James Robertson was born in Kent in 1958, but grew up in Bridge of Allan in Scotland.
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