Sally Magnusson Books in Order

Poet Jack Clemo lives with deafness and blindness beside Cornwall’s industrial claypits, writing and hoping for romance. An unexpected letter in 1967 changes his life, beginning the relationship at the center of Magnusson’s biographical account.

Sally Magnusson recounts everyday life with her husband and five children, beginning shortly after the youngest arrives. Holidays, school performances, household pets, and family quarrels become occasions for observing the pleasures and frustrations of raising a large family.

Sally Magnusson travels with her father to his birthplace in northern Iceland, exploring the family history connecting them to the country. Their journey combines a personal portrait with encounters involving Iceland’s landscape, history, and enduring legends.

Magnusson selects hymns that have held particular meaning at turning points in her life. Personal reflections on joy, loss, and belief accompany an anthology exploring how familiar songs express emotion, preserve memories, and sometimes expose uncomfortable inherited assumptions.

Magnusson investigates the unexpected roles urine has played in civilization, from manufacturing and agriculture to art and popular belief. Historical anecdotes trace how an overlooked human by-product became a traded resource and a recurring ingredient in everyday ingenuity.

Homeless Horace the Haggis finds shelter among the animals of Acre Valley, but a determined hunter and his dangerous cat pursue him. His eccentric new friends must work together to keep him from becoming someone’s dinner.

Horace returns to the adventures and rivalries of Acre Valley, where familiar friends offer company and old enemies remain nearby. A full moon and a fiery sky herald the frightening Ghost Dog, a danger nobody has warned him about.

Sally Magnusson chronicles her mother’s dementia and the family’s efforts to accompany her through its losses and unexpected moments of connection. Combining intimate memoir with reporting, she examines how society responds to people whose memories are disappearing.

Abducted from Iceland during a seventeenth-century pirate raid, a pastor’s wife confronts enslavement in Algiers and devastating separation. Stories remembered from home become a means of preserving herself as unfamiliar relationships lead toward an impossible choice.

In 1856, Isabel Aird accompanies her doctor husband to the construction works at Loch Katrine. Grieving earlier pregnancies and expecting again, she finds unexpected freedom in the changing landscape while a darker presence waits nearby.

Over one night in a Rutherglen tenement, a woman marked by the Highland Clearances opens her past to a prospective lodger. Memories of resistance, displacement, and lasting injury create the possibility of connection long after the original violence.

Magnusson brings together Scottish public figures reflecting on places that matter deeply to them. Their personal accounts, accompanied by photographs, connect landscapes and familiar settings with memory, belonging, emotional resilience, and moments that have shaped their lives.

After a terminal diagnosis, Helen Firth returns to Orkney to confront her past and prepare for death. Her journey intertwines with that of Hel, the Norse ruler of the underworld, as memory draws the goddess toward human life.

Friends are disappearing as Christmas approaches, and Horace joins Major Mole to find them. Snow, unfamiliar dangers, and enemies hoping for a festive haggis dinner complicate their search through the threatening reaches of Acre Valley.