James Robertson

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News of the Dead

Stories

The Professor of Truth

And the Land Lay Still

The Testament of Gideon Mack

To Be Continued

A real romp of a road novel featuring a talking toad. I can't wait

Publisher's description.  A madcap Highland adventure about midlife crises, new friends, and second chances.  Douglas Findhorn Elder is fifty years old, recently dumped and suddenly jobless. Mungo Forth Mungo is a talking toad. And as luck would have it, this toad is determined to help his hapless human chum to sort his life out...

Joyful, warm-hearted, funny ... but buried within are serious points about the stories we tell about ourselves, how history shapes our identity, scarred landscapes and self-selecting communities. In heartsore times we need more books like this.

Funny and fun ... To Be Continued manages to be sad and happy at the same time. You can engage with the post-modern games and references if you like, or you can just sit back and laugh, and cry. A Scottish baroque novel, full of tricks and trinkets, written with warmth and wit.

Robertson manages to skilfully join the quirky with the serious; the surreal with the real. His take on contemporary Scotland is insightful, eccentric and highly readable.

To Be Continued, with its harem-scarem scenarios and surreal twists, was written to entertain.

A wildly eccentric tale laced with dry, deprecating wit

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WODEHOUSE COMIC FICTION PRIZE 2017 
 
An utterly mad, entirely heart-warming Highland adventure from the Man Booker-longlisted author of And the Land lay Still 
 
Douglas is fifty years old - he's just lost his job, been kicked out by his girlfriend and moved back into his dad's house. Just when things are starting to look hopeless, he makes a very unexpected new friend: a talking toad. 
 
Mungo is a wise-cracking, straight-talking, no-nonsense kind of toad - and he is determined to get Douglas's life back on track. Together, man and beast undertake a madcap quest to the distant Highlands, hot on the trail of a hundred-year-old granny, a beautiful Greek nymph, a split-personality alcoholic/teetotaller, a reluctant whisky-smuggler, and the elusive glimmer of redemption . . .

James Robertson is the author of The Fanatic, Joseph Knight, The Testament of Gideon Mack, And the Land Lay Still, The Professor of Truth and To Be Continued. Joseph Knight won the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year, The Testament of Gideon Mack was longlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize, and And the Land Lay Still won the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year. Robertson is also the author of four short story collections, most recently 365: Stories, five poetry collections and numerous children's books written in English and Scots. He runs the independent publishing house Kettillonia, and he is co-founder and general editor of the Scots language imprint Itchy Coo, which produces books in Scots for children and young adults.

Douglas Findhorn Elder is in a sorry state. He's just turned fifty, split up with his girlfriend and been pushed out of his job at the local news rag. On the night of his birthday, he makes an unexpected new friend: a talking toad. 
 
Setting aside the obvious problem, Mungo the toad is the most sensible person Douglas has met for years. And when the man gets embroiled in a wild-goose chase that leads him out of Edinburgh and across the country, naturally the toad goes with him. Awaiting the duo at crumbling Glentaragar Manor are a hundred-year-old firebrand grandmother, a split-personality alcoholic/teetotaller, an elaborate whisky-smuggling conspiracy, and maybe even a shot at redemption . . . 
 
This gloriously surreal romp proves once and for all that the important things in life - friendship, romance, a funeral hearse stuffed with crates of bootlegged whisky - come when you least expect them.

To Be Continued

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James Robertson

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