Books

Paperback
Renard Press, 27 September 2023

The countdown to the millennium has begun, and people are losing their heads. A so-called Y2K expert gives a presentation to Scotland’s eccentric Tech Laird T.S. Mole’s entourage in Edinburgh, and soon long hours, days, weeks and months fill with seemingly chaotic and frantic work on the ‘bug problem’. Soon enough it’ll be just minutes and seconds to go to midnight. Is the world about to end, or will everyone just wake up the next day with the same old New Year’s Day hangover?

A book about what we know and don’t know, about how we communicate and fail to, My Book of Revelations moves from historical revelations to the personal, and climaxes in the bang and flare of fireworks, exploding myths and offering a glimpse of a scandal that will rock Scotland into the twenty-first century. As embers fall silently to earth, all that is left to say is: Are we working in the early days of a better nation?

‘This novel is driven by an inexhaustible stream of imagination and Hood’s fearless desire to leave narrative conventions behind and fly unfettered into a realm of pure ideas. There are definite echoes of Lanark… and a sense that the Glasgow-born Hood is joining in, and extending, a conversation that’s been going on in the more adventurous Scots literature for the past century.’ – Alastair Mabbott, The Herald

Limited-Edition Paperback
Renard Press

Paperback
Renard Press | Waterstones | Blackwells | Bookshop UK

Paperback
Renard Press, 14 September 2022

‘There’s only control, control of ourselves and others. And you have to decide what part you play in that control.’

Cast your eye over the comfortable north London home of a family of high ideals, radical politics and compassionate feelings. Julia, Paul and their two daughters, Olivia and Sophie, look to a better society, one they can effect through ORGAN:EYES, the campaigning group they fundraise for and march with, supporting various good causes.

But is it all too good to be true? When the surface has been scratched and Paul’s identity comes under the scrutiny of the press, a journey into the heart of the family begins. Who are these characters really? Are any of them the ‘real’ them at all? Every Trick in the Book is a genre-deconstructing novel that explodes the police procedural and undercover-cop story with nouveau romanish glee. Hood overturns the stone of our surveillance society to show what really lies beneath.

Hardback
Renard Press

Paperback
Renard Press | Waterstones | Blackwells

Paperback
Renard Press, 30 June 2021

‘Sometimes I wonder if I had known that it was going to take me fourteen years to paint this painting of the Crucifixion, and what it would take for me to paint it, would I have been as happy as I was then?’

Susan Alison MacLeod, a Glasgow School of Art graduate with a dark sense of humour, first lays eyes on Douglas MacDougall at a party in 1988, and resolves to put him on the cross in the Crucifixion painting she’s been sketching out, but her desire for authenticity in her portrayal of suffering means that the painting doesn’t see the light of day for fourteen years.

Over the same years, Douglas’ ever-more elaborately designed urine-filled plastic bags bring him exponentially increasing fame, prizes and commissions, while his modelling for Susan Alison, who continues to work pain and suffering on to the canvas, takes place mostly in the shadows. This Good Book is a wickedly funny, brilliantly observed novel that spins the moral compass and plays with notions of creating art.

‘Astonishing, funny, bonkers, charming, disturbing, challenging, audacious, and, ultimately, profound.’ — Melissa Fu, author of Peach Blossom Spring

Highly original, darkly funny… a compulsive read. — Leigh Chambers

I have no words to say how good this book was. So dark and poetic, so original and intelligent, and so utterly unputdownable. — Tim Ewins, author of We Are Animals

Paperback
Renard Press | Waterstones | Blackwells | Bookshop UK

Audio
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