Saraband Books
Saraband is an award-winning independent publisher of outstanding fiction, absorbing nature writing, pressing environmental issues and compelling memoir. Praised in the Guardian as “a small but brilliant independent press,” we publish authors with deep knowledge of the culture, landscapes, wildlife, folk traditions and history wherever they live. Our fiction includes literary, historical and contemporary stories reflecting UK and international perspectives, all with unforgettable voices. Our authors have won and been shortlisted for literary prizes including the Booker Prize, Desmond Elliott Prize, Author’s Club First Novel and Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing. From our inception, we have provided a platform for underrepresented and local voices that are often overlooked. We are signatories to the Publishers Association’s Inclusivity Action Plan and the Publishing Declares Action pledge for following the most sustainable practices in our industry.
Publications
One Body
One Body is the demystifying, relatable, often hilarious, and sometimes hair-raising story of how Catherine navigates her treatment and the emotions and reflections it provokes. And how she comes to drop the unattainable standards imposed on her body, and simply appreciate the skin she is in.
Case Study
In Case Study, Graeme Macrae Burnet presents both sides: the woman’s notes and the life of Collins Braithwaite. The result is a dazzling, page-turning and wickedly humorous meditation on the nature of sanity, identity and truth itself, by one of the most inventive novelists writing today.
The Lyre Dancers
The Lyre Dancers is the fifth novel by Mandy Haggith and the third in the Stone Stories trilogy, which began with The Walrus Mutterer (2018), longlisted for the Highland Book Prize, and continued with The Amber Seeker (2019).
A Superior Spectre
A Superior Spectre is a novel about curiosity, entitlement and manipulation. It reminds us that the scariest ghosts aren’t the ones that go bump in the night, but those that are born and create a place for themselves in the human soul.
The Amber Seeker
The sequel to The Walrus Mutterer, longlisted for the Highland Book Prize, 2018.
As the Women Lay Dreaming
A novel of the Iolaire disaster.
Emily Bronte Reappraised
A biography with a twist, taking in Emily’s feminism and her passion for nature, as well as the art she’s inspired, and even the “fake news” stories about her. We discover that she was, in fact, a thoroughly modern woman. And now, in the 21st century, it’s time for the real Emily Brontë to please stand up.
The Posy Ring
A novel sure to appeal to fans of Outlander. A modern romance in the Scottish islands runs parallel with the 16th-century tale of a survivor of the Spanish Armada falling in love with a local laird’s daughter.
Burnout
A crime thriller for the Weinstein, Westminster and #MeToo era. Burnout is a gritty, surprising, smart and highly entertaining crime novel that gets to grips with what really goes on behind closed doors…
The Walrus Mutterer
Highly unusual and original historical fiction set in the Iron Age and featuring Rian, an apprentice healer who’s enslaved by a spiteful trader and forced aboard a vessel to embark on a perilous sea voyage. An epic tale that introduces an unforgettable cast of characters in an extraordinary, vividly imagined Celtic world.
Miss Blaine's Prefect and the Golden Samovar
Fifty-something Shona is a proud former pupil of the Marcia Blaine School for Girls, but has a deep loathing for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which she thinks gives her alma mater a bad name. Impeccably educated and an accomplished martial artist, linguist and musician, Shona is thrilled when selected by Marcia Blaine herself to perform a special mission in Imperial Russia. But as the body count rises, will Shona discover in time just who the real villain is?
Goblin
She is an oddball and an outcast. But she’s also a dreamer, a bewitching raconteur, a tomboy adventurer whose spirit can never be crushed.
The Accident on the A35
There does not appear to be anything remarkable about the fatal car crash on the A35. But one question dogs Inspector Georges Gorski: where has the victim, an outwardly austere lawyer, been on the night of his death? The troubled Gorski finds himself drawn into a mystery that takes him behind the respectable veneer of a sleepy French backwater.
The Nature of Winter
Renowned nature writer Jim Crumley ventures out to experience firsthand both the primitiveness and the serenity of nature’s rest period. Jim discovers perfect, glistening winter landscapes. But he also finds that climate change is having a dramatic impact, that it is transforming the very nature of winter.
The Island in Imagination and Experience
Revealing the most fascinating stories of Earth’s half a million islands, this book considers the unique geography, politics and economics of islands and their cultures. It traces their singular place in literature, religion and philosophy, and disentangles the myths and the facts to reveal why islands exert an insistent grip on the imagination.
The Paper Cell
In 1950s London, a literary agent finds fame when he secretly steals a young woman’s brilliant novel manuscript and publishes it under his own name, Lewis Carson. Two days after their meeting, the woman is found strangled: did Lewis purloin the manuscript as an act of callous opportunism, or as the spoils of a calculated murder?
2020
In 2020, Britain is at breaking point, society on the edge. The country is a bomb waiting to explode... and then it does. This provocative literary thriller cleverly lays bare the true state of our nation with an all-too-plausible ‘what if?’ scenario. Told from the wildly differing perspectives of a myriad of voices, it is a parable for our times.
Ed’s Dead
Meet Jen, who works in a bookshop until she accidentally kills her crap boyfriend. Now that Ed’s dead, she has to decide what to do with his body, his drugs and a big pile of cash. And, more pressingly, how to escape the hitman who’s been sent to recover Ed’s stash. A modern noir that proves the female of the species really is more deadly than the male.
The Curiosity Cabinet
A novel sure to appeal to fans of Outlander. A modern love story in the Scottish islands runs parallel with the darker 18th-century tale of Henrietta Dalrymple, kidnapped by the formidable Manus McNeill and held against her will.
The Dead Don't Boogie
A missing teenage girl should be an easy job for Dominic Queste – after all, finding lost souls is what he does best. But wouldn’t it be better sometimes if lost souls just stayed that way? Modern noir at its finest.
The Nature of Autumn
An intimate – and deeply personal – portrait of a moody and majestic British autumn. Longlisted for the Wainwright Prize.
Expecting: The Inner Life of Pregnancy
Expecting takes the reader on a physical, emotional, philosophical and artistic odyssey through pregnancy. A memoir exploring each of the nine months of Chitra’s pregnancy, Expecting is a book of intimate, strange, wild and lyrical essays that pay tribute to this most extraordinary and ordinary of experiences.
The Hormone Factory
A riveting thriller about greed, power, hormones, illicit sex, and women … and the monstrous megalomaniac who believes he can have it all.
His Bloody Project
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, 2016. A brutal triple murder in a remote crofting community in 1869 leads to the arrest of 17-year-old Roderick Macrae. There’s no question that Macrae landed the savage blows, but what drove him to commit such merciless acts of violence? A mesmerising literary thriller.