Fremont is a masterful, shattering examination of that special brand of madness with which only your family can infect you. At times it simmers like Jeffrey Eugenides’s Virgin Suicides; sometimes, the text feels like a lyrical, magical spell, in the fashion of Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles.

Read it slowly. It is a story to be savoured, cried over, and celebrated.

Read the full review here.

1. Cookie Cabaret – why choose one event when you can see them all at once? The cream of the Scottish lit scene, indie bands and graffiti artists vie for your attention beside top eatery Cookie. It’s artsy Glasgow in a nutshell you can eat.  Worth fighting the bespectacled hipsters to get a ticket, especially if you are one. (12 April, 7.30-10.30pm)
2. A L Kennedy: On Writing – if you’re a fan of her columns in The Guardian you’ll know what to expect! Honest, witty, strange and sage; the stand-up novelist surprises and inspires with her collected musings. (19 April, 6-7pm)
3. Muriel Spark – 50 years on from its publication, we are still trying to work out why The Girls of Slender Means fascinates us so. An impressive panel including Janice Galloway discuss Edinburgh’s most caustic daughter. (13 April, 7.30-9pm)
4. Fifty Shades of Feminism – half a century ago Betty Friedan’s second wave feminist classic The Feminine Mystique caused uproar. How much roar is left? Rather than the same old tired diatribes, this debate is bound to get global and sparky between the formidable Bidisha and Rachel Holmes. (14 April, 7.30-9pm)
5. Book Spine Poetry workshop – what’s the point of a lit festival if you don’t get wordy? This one lets you run amok in the Mitchell Library. Surrealist bibliophiles with a good sense of humour need apply; kids welcome too. Running on both the 14th and 20th of April. Take a look at all the workshops though, from character speed dating, to detectives and museum objects there’s something for everyone, plus some drop in freebies. (14 & 20 April, 3-4.30pm)
6. University of Glasgow Showcase – did I say five? Well, I lied. Alumni from Glasgow Uni’s prestigious Creative Writing programme justifiably show off.  Includes Anne Donovan of Buddha Da fame and the experi-mental Nick-E Melville. Dazzling and diverse. And *FREE*. (16 April, 6-7pm)

Besides all that, Tracey Thorn talks about her life in pop, teeny Sandi Toksvig tells us a tall tale, Alasdair Gray’s Short Stories are worth celebrating, Kathleen Jamie has an impressive new poetry collection and David Shrigley has got to be as weird in person as his cartoons, right? What are your top picks? Will we see you there?

KATY HASTIE

If, like me, you spent any time looking for a Valentine’s Day card this week, hurried yet dreading a poor decision, turning over the soppy, banal or lewd contributions of romance marketeers towards stating your feelings, you might have wondered if there isn’t a better way of saying ‘I love you’ than a card with a Quentin Blake-esque sketch of coupling on the sofa, as one card manufacturer obviously thinks its customers would find romantic. I turned up some literary moments to inspire you to find something more original.

Thinking ahead? Take Scheherezade’s 1001 Nights as inspiration and read your lover a new story every day for 1001 nights. It’ll save you thinking of something new for at least another 2 years, and will win immense kudos in the commitment stakes. The goodwill engendered should give you the moral high ground even if you then forget every romantic milestone for the next 2.74 years. Also, you could be sneaky and outsource the selection to your local indie bookshop.

Fabulous date? Margaret Atwood’s hero tells his mistress a new part of his sci-fi thriller The Blind Assassin each time they meet, so she comes back as much for the story as the sex.

Long distance relationship? Martin, the obsessive-compulsive shut-in of Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry, unable to bring himself to leave the house to go to her, arranges for his wife in Amsterdam to have a private room in a restaurant, where he phones her to share the meal, in an eccentrically tender romantic scene.

In a hurry? LM Montgomery used to hide Anne’s lovering talk behind the useful phrase ‘several pages omitted’, believing that readers would not find them interesting. This would make an excellent love letter for the discerning gentleman, and would also save you an awful lot of dithering in the shop.

What literary moments have inspired you?

Elizabeth Reeder will be chatting to the Golden Hare Bookshop’s reading group on Monday 28th January, at 7pm. The reading group is always looking for new members, contact goldenharebooks@gmail.com or visit the beautiful shop at 102 West Bow, Edinburgh (just off the Grassmarket) to join.

www.goldenharebooks.com

ELIZABETH REEDER, novelist, author of Ramshackle and Fremont. You can follow her on Twitter @ekreeder.

Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck. Erpenbeck’s third, thin novel builds itself up from the ground and into the shape of houses by a lake and is about the successive families that live here, before, through and after the atrocities of war. The language is simple, almost of folklore, and it took one of my classes 45 minutes and a very very long piece of paper  to sketch the timeline of events with any confidence. That said, it’s an amazing book and the first read is an act of making yourself lost, each read after is about becoming more and more found.

Twelve Minutes of Love: A Tango Story by Kapka Kassabova. Memoir, essay and all close-dancing in a book about Argentinian tango. The subject is fascinating and the writing superb. It definitely made me want to put on some closed-toed shoes and give it a try.

Nox by Anne Carson. An eulogy, a translation and a work of art. Like all her work, this can’t quite be defined, but it’s something visceral that cuts through our need to understand and simply becomes experience. She’s not to everyone’s taste, but for me she represent a fearless writer who communicates the deeply problematic, the inexpressible.

I’m looking forward to reading The Lighthouse by Alison Moore and Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson.

Since I view most reading as entertainment and inspiration (to read more, to write more, to make more), if you’ll indulge me I’d like to recommend a film. I recommend seeing Pina, the Wim Wender film about the dancer, choreographer, genius Pina Bausch.  If you’re down, if you’re happy, if you’re stuck, if everything is flowing, it reminds us of bodies and art and daring. How to fall and trust and oh, that dive. That dive is incredible.

SUSIE MAGUIRE, author of the short story collections The Short Hello and Furthermore, and editor of four anthologies of short fiction, including Little Black Dress. She lives in Edinburgh. You can find her on Twitter as @WrathOfGod.

At EIBF this August, Morag Joss read from and discussed her 7th novel, Across The Bridge (now in paperback, Alma, £7.99, in the US, this title is Among The Missing, Random House), and it was fascinating. Her work is always strong and subtle, she has great instinct for story, and this one, about the meeting of three lost souls struggling with tragic circumstances – aka Fate – is truly mythic.
www.moragjoss.com

Diana Hendry has written several books for children, but her new novel, The Seeing, (The Bodley Head, £10.99) is one I think adults will also enjoy. Set in 1953, it features three children, one of whom has ‘second sight’, and Hendry’s poetic eye brings their relationships and dilemmas beautifully to life.
www.dianahendry.co.uk

I’m also cherishing a copy of Cynthia Rogerson’s new novel If I Touched The Earth (Black & White, £7.99) like an unopened present, to be read at Christmas time.

DOROTHY ALEXANDER, poet and teacher

A book that I enjoyed this year focused on the father/child relationship. A Death in the Family: My Struggle Book 1 by Karl Ove Knausgaard (Author), Don Bartlett (Translator), Harvill Secker; I found it brave, writerly, surprising and deeply satisfying.

VICKI JARRETT, author of Nothing is Heavy

The Lighthouse by Alison Moore
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize this year, this is my most recent read of 2012. I tore through it in a day. Gripping, bleak and tinged with a deep sense of melancholy and irredeemable loss. Moore’s writing style is sparse and taut but full of echoes and reflections that make the story both dreamlike and all too real. A stunning debut.

Tales from the Mall by Ewan Morrison
This isn’t a novel, and it isn’t a collection of short stories, as such. It’s a hybrid mutation of fact, fiction, social history, anti-consumerist polemic and reportage. I’ve always found shopping centres to be alienating and slightly scary places. Turns out I’m not the only one and that my response is perfectly rational, given the facts. This book is better for you than ‘shopping therapy’ any day.

This Isn’t the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You by Jon McGregor
A collection of short stories from the author of If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things and Even The Dogs. Jon McGregor indulges his more experimental side here with some fascinating and challenging short works. By turns exhilarating and perplexing, there is some truly beautiful writing here shot through with a pervading air of menace that lingers.

Wonder by R.J. Palacio
This odd little cross-over book is suitable for any reasonably literate child (or adult), aged nine and up. It follows the trials of 10-year-old Auggie who suffers from a severe facial deformity and is starting school for the first time. Adults may find it sugary in places, and the conclusion is so upbeat it deserves its own brass band. However, I can certainly recommend it as a good cross-generational reading experience for the whole family.

EM STRANG, poet

David Troupes, The Simple Men (Two Ravens Press). Vivid, spacious, tightly honed poems about the human and nonhuman animal, and the relationship between the two.

Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Harvard University Press). One of the best texts I’ve read on thinking through nature, questioning embedded and embodied ideologies and trying to define the strange intimacy of ecological interrelationship.

LINDA CRACKNELL,  author of Life Drawing, The Searching Glance and A Wilder Vein

World Enough and Time: On Creativity and Slowing Down, Christian McEwen, Bauhan Publishing (in the UK, copies can be ordered through Eurospan)
In this study of the relationship between slowness, living simply and being creative, Christian McEwen advocates walking, talking, reading, telling stories, dreaming and being alert as a route to happiness. It’s a playful book with a wise undertow, drawing on the author’s own experience, dipping widely into other writings, and offering the reader ‘tactics’ to try at the end of each chapter. A ‘manual’ and inspiration I will want to revisit regularly.

In Another World: Among Europe’s Dying Villages, Tom Pow, Polygon
A marvellously unclassifiable book, this is as much about journeys and the road as it is about home, places, people, stones and change. It crosses genres – poetry, essays, short stories – as well as crossing the continent – Spain, France, Russia. What glitters through it is the writer’s compassionate and warm engagement with the people he meets and gives voice to, who are on the cusp of losing ways of life and inventing new futures.

The Lighthouse, Alison Moore, Salt
As a keen walker myself it was the walking tour in Germany providing a circular narrative that initially drew me to this novel. However middle-aged Futh was soon suffering from blisters and sunburn, was getting lost and forgetting to take any food. (I at least would have taken a map and some Compeed.) Even without reflections on the end of his marriage, and the reliving of a painful previous holiday with his father, it all seemed rather bleak and pathetic. Despite this, I found The Lighthouse a compelling one-sitting read which accelerates the reader’s discomfort at a growing menace simultaneously with Futh’s apparent ease with himself as he draws towards the closure of his circular journey.

HELEN SEDGWICK, writer and editor. Find her on Twitter @helensedgwick.

My Mother Was An Upright Piano is a new collection of short short fiction from Tania Hershman. Published by Tangent Books in 2012, these off-beat stories are quirky and addictive; most only a page or two long, they combine Hershman’s love of science with her understanding of humanity. Perfect for dipping into between presents and turkey, the collection is small but perfectly formed.

If you want a creepy Christmas this year, Louise Welsh’s The Girl On The Stairs is one to read in front of the fire. Welsh’s characteristic claustrophobia doesn’t disappoint, and with uncertainties about motherhood, isolation in a foreign city, and shadowy figures passing in the dark, there’s enough going on here to keep you gripped through the holidays.

The nice thing about my selection is that they’re all within a few streets of each other. The Grassmarket in Edinburgh has turned into a wonderful alternative to Princes Street for unique gift shopping, with a host of art galleries, bookshops, haberdasheries, vintage shops, a hatter’s, classy cashmere shops (unlike many of the Royal Mile tartan tatteries) and a few nice pubs for a post-parting-with-your-cash mulled cider.

The Red Door Gallery, 42 Victoria Street, Edinburgh EH1 2JW, www.edinburghart.com
I could spend all day and the contents of my bank account here. From Donna Wilson cushions to unusual art prints, make-your-own mobile kits to jewellery, this tiny shop just up from the Grassmarket is packed with the kind of lovely pieces that would make Christmas morning sparkle for any art-lover.

Godiva, 9 Westport, Edinburgh EH1 2JA, www.godivaboutique.co.uk‎
A gorgeous treasure chest of independent designer and vintage clothes, jewellery and accessories. When we’re talking about designer clothes, we’re not talking £700 for a dress – Godiva supports local and starting-out fashion designers, including art students and the just-graduated, so although it’s not as cheap as some of the well-curated vintage stock in their back room, it isn’t outrageous either – ideal for a unique gift for the special man or woman in your life. And the accessories and jewellery are well within any gift budget.

Analogue Books, 39 Candlemaker Row, Edinburgh EH1 2QB, www.analoguebooks.co.uk
I had to include at least one bookshop in my top three, because new books really do make my Christmas holidays a magical time. Analogue is the best shop in Edinburgh for unusual coffee-table books, zines, art and design books, and the occasional print. Intelligently selected, I’d like to read every book they stock.

… and an honourable mention to a few more far-flung (book)shops…

The Golden Hare, 102 West Bow, Edinburgh, goldenharebooks.com
A relative newcomer to the street, but one that deserves to prosper for its beautiful selection of illustrated fiction, non-fiction and mini gallery space

The Edinburgh Bookshop, 219 Bruntsfield Place, Edinburgh EH10 4DH, www.edinburghbookshop.com
I always mean to read more non-fiction, and The Edinburgh Bookshop is an inspiration. It’s partly the small and un-intimidating size of the shelf space in this teeny shop, but largely the thoughtful curation of titles that make it stand out. They’re great at helping you find kids’ books too.

The Fruitmarket Gallery, 45 Market Street, Edinburgh EH1 1DF, http://fruitmarket.co.uk/
Alongside their usual delightful bookshop and cafe, the Fruitmarket are running special artisan Christmas stalls on late-night shopping nights in the three Thursdays running up to Christmas. Open from 6–9pm on 6, 13 and 20 December.

LEILA CRUICKSHANK

‘O God!’ I screamed, and ‘O God!’ again and again; for there before my eyes – pale and shaken, and half fainting, and groping before him with his hands, like a man restored from death – there stood Henry Jekyll! DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE

Christine Wilson

If you’ve got your costume, have apples ready to be dooked and carved pumpkins guarding your door, why not settle down in your haunted house with a book to read?

We may no longer be burning witches at the stake but the fascination with the supernatural is as old as mankind, and it doesn’t seem like we’re going to lose our love of ghouls any time soon. Scary stories hold a deep place in our psyches, and fairytales could be considered our first encounter with the genre. These stories are universal, told and retold throughout the world (Angela Carter’s Book of Fairytales has great stories which appear in different forms across the globe). Often life lessons or morality tales, the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood or the ugly sisters in Cinderella are no less vicious or relentless than modern day horror villains, and the tales have the same real/unreal atmosphere of modern urban legends.

However, the horror genre as we know it today really began in the nineteenth century (Grimms’ Children’s and Household Tales – or Grimm’s Fairy Tales – was published in 1812). There are four classic horror books which have themes and ideas that raise their heads again and again in the horror genre, no matter what the medium. These are Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson, Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker, and The Turn of the Screw (1898) by Henry James. These texts seem so well known in our culture that it can feel as if there is little point in picking up the books. But, like the fairytales, these stories have so often been adapted by the teller to suit their purposes, that your expectations may be challenged when you pick up a copy.

Classic horror themes encompassed in these novels:
Frankenstein: The manipulation of life and death
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: Leading a double life
Dracula: The threat of a mysterious stranger
The Turn of the Screw: Mental fragility blurring events

These timeless ideas are just as disquieting today as they were when these books were written. They play on the characters’ vulnerability and leave them powerless, at the mercy of the next terrifying and unexplained event to befall them. These are suggestions which can make you feel uneasy in your own home when reading them – and when horror has made your safest place unsafe, you know that its work is done.

In today’s horror fiction, traditional elements are often softened and reshaped – just think of the vampires in the Twilight series or the witches in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books.  And many people will read their first proper ‘horror’ books as children, especially in the Point Horror or Goosebumps series (how about RL Stein’s ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ Goosebumps?). But what would be a genuinely scary modern book for Kohl readers this Halloween?

Stephen King is of course the one person most associated with horror fiction. Some other fairly recent publications are Hilary Mantel’s Orange-shortlisted Black Magic, and Sarah Water’s The Little Stranger. I found some of Neil Gaiman’s short stories in Fragile Things pretty scary, and I did grow up terrified by Roald Dahl’s The Witches – especially the little girl who was trapped in the picture getting older and older…

But perhaps the most unsettling pieces of horror can occur outside the genre. Does 1984’s Room 101 rate a horror mention?  Or perhaps graphic novels offer the perfect blend to take the genre onwards, especially when film seems to be torn between sanitised horror and headline-grabbing torture porn.

Where do you think the horror genre will go next? And what scary book would you recommend for this Halloween?

For the final episode, Elizabeth discusses the lines that capture the themes of the novel; home, inheritance, gender and racial inequality. Ideas of making, creating and breaking families.

Final episode Fremont from Kohl Publishing on Vimeo.

Book group chat

What is so bad that you have to leave a family? How do you define family?

And how did Tex get his limp? What does this represent?

Today Elizabeth talks about metaphors and maps and the books that influenced her creation of Rachel and the rest of the family, and how this has been different in Fremont than with her previous novel.

If you missed the vlog for Episodes 1 to 3, watch it here, and you’ll find the chat on Episode 4 and Episode 5 interesting too.

Fremont Episode 6: metaphor from Kohl Publishing on Vimeo.

Book group chat

How important is metaphor to writing? The map in Fremont becomes an overarching metaphor within the book; how did you feel about that? And about the smaller metaphors within the text?

This week’s discussion takes us to a darker place, looking at bullying within families, and outwith them too.

If you missed the vlog for Episodes 1 to 3, watch it here, and you’ll find the chat on Episode 4 right here too.

Fremont Episode 5: Bullying from Kohl Publishing on Vimeo.

Book group chat

How do you feel about the bullying in the book, either by outsiders or by the family? Flo is called a bully by the townspeople. Do you agree? What are your own experiences of bullying and how did they affect your family life?