What You’ll Want to Read for Your U.K. Voyage, Especially if You Love Scotland

Mary Stuart stood out in any crowd. Nearly 6 feet tall in an era when the average man barely hit 5 feet 7 inches, she cut a striking figure with auburn hair and a passion for dogs, horses and gambling.

But Mary Queen of Scots often felt trapped inside her heavily fortified castles, hounded relentlessly by a public obsessed with her every step and suitor. So the young sixteenth century monarch would disguise herself in men’s clothes to slip away for evenings in Edinburgh. Other times she escaped to Scotland’s coast to enjoy the simple pleasures of cooking and keeping house in St. Andrews. 

The high-stakes drama of Mary Stuart’s world unfolds in “Homecoming: The Scottish Years of Mary, Queen of Scots,” a lively history by author and journalist Rosemary Goring that’s also part travelogue. You’ll find a sense of place and a sense of her. 

‘Homecoming: The Scottish Years of Mary, Queen of Scots,’ by Rosemary Goring

“Homecoming” is a worthy addition to any Scotland adventure reading list, especially if you’re a history buff or a fan of a certain wildly popular series of time travel books that has piqued your interest in Highlands culture (see photo at top) and men in kilts.

“Homecoming” retraces the 18-year-old queen’s return from France to Scotland, taking readers inside the castles, palaces, battlefields and more from Mary’s reign, then and as they stand today. Reviewer Allan Massie writes in the Scotsman: “Sixteenth-century Scottish history is fascinating, great to read about here, terrible to have experienced.”

Mary Stuart, crowned queen as an infant and beheaded in exile at 44, has been captured in numerous films, plays and books, including historical biographer Antonia Fraser’s “Mary Queen of Scots.” Goring focuses on the 12 years the royal lived in Scotland and says she took “a wholly Scottish perspective” to explore how much of Mary’s downfall was the result of her poor decisions and to what extent her homeland was to blame.

Here are more trip reading suggestions, a mix of genres, voices and locales. All have a strong sense of place and feature engaging characters you’d be happy to meet on vacation. All are available as audiobooks, easy companions you can download before you go.

’44 Scotland Street,’ ‘Outlander’ and ‘My Friends’

Alexander McCall Smith, author of “44 Scotland Street,” crossed paths with Armistead Maupin at a California party and was intrigued to hear the backstory of Maupin’s “Tales of the City,” originally written as a serialized novel published in the San Francisco Chronicle.

When Smith returned home, he pitched a serialized Edinburgh story to the Scotsman newspaper. So began “44 Scotland Street,” a slice-of-life mystery written on deadline for the local paper that grew into a popular book series. Smith says he wanted to use fiction to “say something about life in this extraordinary city.” Sometimes he injected real people into “Scotland Street,” among them Scottish crime writer Ian Rankin, known for his “Knotts and Crosses” and other Inspector Rebus novels.

“Outlander” author Diana Gabaldon, an Arizona college professor, started her first manuscript as practice to see whether she could write a novel. She didn’t worry about sticking with a genre, she says, because she didn’t expect anyone to see the book.

The result was an intense time travel saga that introduced a World War II British Army nurse who accidentally steps through standing stones, lands in a warring 1743 Scotland and falls for a hunky kilt-wearing clansman.

 Is “Outlander” a romance novel? Sci-fi? Fantasy? Horror? Historical fiction? Whatever you call it, the bestseller has spawned eight more novels to date and a hit Netflix series, not to mention pumping up Scottish tourism.

Hisham Matar’s “My Friends,” a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction, spins a moving story of friendship, family, secrets and the consequences of one reckless action that changes a life. The narrator is a Libyan exile who earns a scholarship to Edinburgh University, then lives in London for 32 years.

“Matar offers a beautifully panoptic portrait of London as the city of literary exile and emigration par excellence,” James Wood writes in the New Yorker.

‘The Searcher,’ ‘Past Lying’ and ‘Windswept’

Tana French’s novel “The Searcher” spins an unlikely friendship between Cal, a brooding Chicago cop recently retired to rural Ireland, and Trey, a teenage urchin who stalks the new neighbor looking for help finding a missing brother.

After six novels about police detectives in Dublin, French shifted gears with this slow-building, atmospheric crime story set in the Irish countryside. As a follow-up, French brings back this odd couple in a 2024 sequel, “The Hunter.”

“Past Lying,” by Val McDermid, Scotland’s Queen of Crime, is for you if you enjoy mysteries to escape. “Past Lying” is the latest installment in McDermid’s tartan noir series featuring DCI Karen Pirie on the cold case beat.

The detective digs into a deadly rivalry between two novelists in a story set during Edinburgh’s pandemic shutdown. “McDermid, an avid gamer and adopter of social media, moves effortlessly between scenes of a musty archive, old fashioned shoe leather and cutting-edge technology,” Lisa Levy writes in the Washington Post.

“Windswept: Life, Nature and Deep Time in the Scottish Highlands,’ by Annie Worsley, is a lyrical book of nature writing and discovery and is like a peaceful walk in the woods.

Worsley left her career as a British professor of environmental change to take on a croft (a small land holding) on the west coast of Scotland. She began posting stories and photographs of the hills and the heather, the sounds and seasons of the north-western Highlands surrounding her family’s new home. Her blog grew into “Windswept.”

‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brody,’ ‘The Fraud’ and ‘Spare ‘

Muriel Spark, the author of “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” was a poet and literary critic before turning to fiction. She used her school experiences to inspire her classic novel. Goring calls Sparks her favorite Scottish novelist for her “sparkling and witty” style. But “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” which is set in Edinburgh, offers a brilliant cameo of the city through the eyes of a former pupil of an inspirational and dangerously deluded teacher.

“The Fraud,” by Zadie Smith, is the author’s first historical novel, Smith delves into a 19th-century criminal trial of a defendant accused of impersonating a nobleman. The New York Times chose “The Fraud” one of the 10 best books of 2023, praising Smith’s knack for sending up literary culture while reflecting on whose stories are told and whose are overlooked.

“As always,”  reviewer Karan Mahajan wrote, “it is a pleasure to be in Zadie Smith’s mind, which, as time goes on, is becoming contiguous with London itself.”

“Spare,” by Prince Harry, crafted his best-selling page-turner with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and ghostwriter J.R. Moehringer. Well-written and dishy, “Spare” offers an insider’s view of growing up royal, recounting happy childhood summers at Balmoral Castle (“a cross between Disney World and some sacred Druid grove”) and the heartbreaking scene in Harry’s bedroom when an emotionless Prince Charles tells the 12-year-old that his mother, Princess Diana, has died in a car crash.

‘Good Night, Irene,’ ‘Impossible Creatures’ and ‘London’s Number One Dog-Walking Agency’

Luis Alberto Urrea, author of “Good Night, Irene,” began investigating, after his mother’s death, a hidden history buried in his own family. Phyliss Irene McLaughlin de Urrea had served with the Red Cross during World War II in a group nicknamed the “Donut Dollies.” The women rumbled across the front lines in 2 1/2-ton trucks fitted with coffee machines and doughnut makers. Yet Urrea found scarce record of their service.

The author spent a decade retracing his mother’s steps across London and the back roads of Germany and Austria and published “Good Night, Irene” as a historical novel in 2023.

Katherine Rundell, author of “Impossible Creatures,” is an Oxford academic-turned-novelist whose work will appeal to fans of Philip Pulman’s “The Golden Compass.”

The story begins when a boy named Christopher is packed off to Scotland to stay with his grandfather and stumbles into a portal opening to a secret – and magical – Archipelago. The action takes off as Christopher teams up with a flying girl named Mal to help save unicorns, mermaids, griffins and other rare creatures.

Kate MacDougall, author of “London’s Number One Dog-Walking Agency,” a quirky, often funny memoir, reveals London from the leash level. The writer quit her job at Sotheby’s in frustration and decided to start a dog-walking business. She quickly discovers the gig is less about dogs and more about navigating clueless, needy pet owners.

As her agency grows, MacDougall scrambles to hire employees and grapples with new clients, including recently relocated American businesspeople seeking help with their pedigree pups. Behind their “perfect dentistry” and exclamations of “Awesome,” the American customers are obnoxiously demanding, she confides. “It’s never just as simple as ‘Please take my dog out for a walk.’ There were feeding requirements and allergies to ingredients you never heard of.”