The Private Memoirs & Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg

Set in Scotland at the beginning of the 18th century, the anti-hero Robert Wringhim, commits a series of murders under the influence of a mysterious stranger who may or may not be the devil. The novel is divided into three parts: a factual summary by the editor, Wringhim’s confession, and the subsequent discovery of Wringhim’s body and the shocking confessions buried with him. Hogg presents a powerful picture of evil in this controversial masterpiece of Scottish fiction. The novel offers no easy or definitive answers and the reader will be left to wonder whether Robert Wringhim was indeed visited by the devil or if he imagined the whole thing.

 

​The Master of Ballantrae by R. L. Stevenson

In Stevenson’s classic tale, two noble Scottish brothers deliberately take opposing sides in the Jacobite rising in order to preserve the family fortune. Stevenson’s historical adventure romance returns to his favourite theme – the struggle between good and evil, set against a beautiful Scottish landscape.
 

​The House with the Green Shutters by George Douglas Brown

Set in mid-19th century Ayrshire, the novel describes the struggles of businessman John Gourlay against the scheming of the envious villagers, an ambitious competitor, and the arrival of the railway. Brown’s ‘truthful’ plot was welcomed as an antidote to the ‘Kailyard’ school of writing. The House with the Green Shutters is an unsentimental examination of Scottish village life and was hugely influential on authors of the Scottish Renaissance, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Hugh MacDiarmid among them.