If you haven’t got into the Skelfs series yet, this is the insane deal for you. For some inexplicable reason, THE ENTIRE SERIES SO FAR is available on ebook for 99p in total, with only TWO DAYS left on this offer. This amounts to seven years of work and almost half a million words, all for under a quid. Get it here, you won’t regret it.
Just look at all the lovely events I have coming up, talking about Ghost Notes as well as 20 years as a published author. For tickets and more details, go here.
I’m delighted to be appearing at the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival again this year, talking about 20 years of murder and mayhem with old pal Chris Brookmyre. We’re on Friday 24th July at 3pm. It’s always a cracking weekend with a bunch of writer and reader pals, so come and find us.
My LOVELY local independent bookshop – The Portobello Bookshop – are now offering signed and dedicated copies of Ghost Notes, the forthcoming seventh book in my Skelfs series. You can pre-order now and they’ll send them out on publication day, the 13th of August. Just click here and away you go.
It’s been a while, right? But we’re back on the road – can’t wait to get out there again.
17th June, St Mary’s Church, Mold
This is courtesy of The Mold Bookshop, and will be a book event with some acoustic tunes thrown in.
18th June, Heswall Hall
This is thanks to Linghams Booksellers, a book event then a full-band gig.
I am appearing at a bunch of festivals coming up, details below. Would love to see your beautiful, happy face at one of them:
15th May, Paisley Book Festival
With Chris Brookmyre, talking about our combined 50 years as published writers to Val McDermid! Ooft.
6th & 7th June, Motive Crime & Mystery Festival, Toronto
Thrilled to be back at this great festival in Toronto, doing an event and an editing masterclass.
13th June, Borders Book Festival
With Chris Brookmyre again – we might be tempted to play a couple of tunes.
20th June, Capital Crime
In that London with Chris Brookmyre, Sarah Hilary and Chris Merritt.
21st June, Dundee Book Festival
More details on this one soon.
24th July, Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, Harrogate
Chatting to Chris Brookmyre about 20 years of rock ‘n’ roll.
…PLUS there’s a bunch more dates in August and September that haven’t been announced yet.
I had an incredibly in-depth and wide-ranging chat with old pal Ali Braidwood over on his Scots Whay Hae! podcast, where we talked about EVERY SINGLE BOOK I’ve written over 20 years. Ooft. If you have the stomach for it, here it is, or watch us blether on YouTube.
I’ll be chatting to the mighty Val McDermid about the book at my local Portobello Bookshop on Tuesday 21st April. I suspect we’ll talk a lot about music and drugs and maybe seagulls. There will also be another special musical performance, different from last time. You can get tickets here and order special signed and dedicated copies of the novel from the bookshop’s website.
The band I was in at the time the book first came out – Northern Alliance – put out an album as The Ossians, called The Macpherson Tapes, playing songs from the novel. Meta as hell, right? You can listen to it anywhere you stream your music, or download it from Bandcamp.
So when I first submitted the novel to my editor, it had lyric quotes from other bands at the start of each chapter. My editor helpfully pointed out that this would cost literally thousands of pounds to get clearance, so I wrote some Ossians lyrics instead.
But you can listen to the playlist of all those other bands and artists here. Don’t say I’m not good to you.
The book is going on a lovely blog tour, starting today, details below. Thanks to Anne Cater for organising. Huge thanks to all the book bloggers for their time and consideration in writing reviews, as always.
My second novel, The Ossians, is back from the dead today. My publisher Orenda Books have produced a brand new edition with a beautiful cover by Mark Swan and a terrific introduction by Val McDermid. Special thanks to Karen Sullivan at Orenda, as always.
You can buy the paperback here or at your local independent bookshop.
You can buy the ebook here.
Connor is twenty-four: brilliant, broken, and out of control. He’s the swaggering frontman of The Ossians, a Scottish indie band on the brink of signing a major record deal.
Desperate to make their mark, they set off on a two-week winter tour across Scotland’s cities and hinterlands ― a last-ditch attempt to find fame, purpose, and themselves.
But the tour soon spirals into a surreal, chaotic odyssey. From seedy bars and snowbound towns to a final, defining Glasgow gig, the band hurtles through a whirlwind of seagull massacres, botched drug deals, a mysterious stalker, radioactive beaches, bomb-testing ranges, epileptic fits, riotous Russian submariners, deadly storms, epiphanies, regular beatings and random shootings.
Raw, darkly funny and wild with energy, The Ossians is a gloriously anarchic story of rock’n’roll obsession, national identity and self-destruction ― and what it means to belong: in a band, in a country, in a life unravelling at speed.
Folk were losing their shit (not really, but they said nice things):
‘Packed with seedy, sticky bars, sullen punters and morose reflections in deteriorating weather, there is an atmospheric beauty to The Ossians’ ― Independent on Sunday
‘The authentic ring of a man who’s been there’ ― The Guardian
‘Johnstone is good at describing the excitement, boredom, sniping and bonhomie of a touring band at the transit-van end of the career arc’ ― The Times
‘A blast’ ― Scotland on Sunday
‘A powerful and moving commentary on the country and its defining myths’ ― Ian Rankin
‘A drug-fuelled, counterclockwise state-of-the-nation rock ’n’ roll tour captures where we were at better than any modern novel I’ve read’ ― Irvine Welsh
‘So exhilaratingly authentic, you can hear the chords and smell the vomit’ ― Christopher Brookmyre
‘A gripping, compelling road trip around modern Scotland’ ― Niall Griffiths
‘This is This Is Spinal Tap for Scotland’s lost generation. Johnstone has taken a small story of a small band lost in a small country and created an epic’ ― Ewan Morrison
‘Entertains in the uncharted corners of an unseen Scotland’ ― The List
Doug Johnstone 