Herald Scotland roundup

Herald Scotland used a single 10-book roundup to sketch the range of new British publishing, from Scottish verse and fantasy to books on Dunblane, Rasputin and Vladimir Putin’s Russia. (heraldscotland.com) The piece was published by The Herald on April 11, 2026, under the headline “10 new books reviewed: fiction, history and memoir,” and was written by columnist Rosemary Goring. Goring has long worked as a literary editor in Scottish newspapers, including The Herald and Scotland on Sunday. (heraldscotland.com) (birlinn.co.uk) One of the books singled out was *Knockan* by former Glasgow Makar Jim Carruth, published by Tapsalteerie on March 1, 2026. The publisher describes it as a “novel-in-verse” set in Assynt and centered on two women, geology and family grief. (tapsalteerie.co.uk) (walmart.com) The roundup also reached beyond Scotland. Caroline Fraser’s *Murderland*, published by Penguin on June 10, 2025, examines serial killing in the American Pacific Northwest and was later named a finalist for the 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. (penguinrandomhouse.com) (books.google.com) The Dunblane title in the mix was Stephen McGinty’s *One Morning in March: Dunblane and the Shooting that Changed Britain*, published March 12, 2026. Atlantic Books says the book revisits the March 13, 1996 school shooting in which 16 children and their teacher were killed after a gunman fired 105 bullets in less than four minutes. (atlanticbooks.com) (waterstones.com) That subject carries fresh weight because Dunblane remains one of the defining events in modern Scottish public life and in Britain’s gun-control history. McGinty’s publisher bills his book as the first full account timed to the 30th anniversary year of the killings. (atlanticbooks.com) (thebookseller.com) The Russian history strand is equally current. Antony Beevor’s *Rasputin: The Downfall of the Romanovs* was released in Britain on March 12, 2026, and publisher material presents it as a new biography linking Rasputin’s rise at court to the Romanov collapse. (weidenfeldandnicolson.co.uk) (books.google.com) Alongside that backward look, newer books on Putin-era Russia argue that the Kremlin’s politics now depend heavily on ideology, myth and state-managed memory after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Recent titles including *The Closing of the Russian Mind*, *Memory Makers* and *Putin and the Return of History* all frame contemporary Russia through that lens. (labyrinthbooks.com) (amazon.com) (books.google.com) What The Herald assembled, then, was less a list of “beach reads” than a snapshot of what publishers are putting in front of British readers in spring 2026: regional poetry, genre fiction, unresolved national trauma and Russian power politics in the same column. That compact mix is why a 10-book roundup can double as a map of the season’s concerns. (heraldscotland.com)