A Tomb With a View: The Stories and Glories of Graveyards: Scottish Non-fiction Book of the Year 2021

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is writ large in A Tomb with a View, in Ross's encounters with tour guides, local historians, a gardener, a stonecutter, even a recent widow. But let’s face it, once you’ve stood in front of their lichened graves and read the inscriptions, unless you’re writing a biography, what else is there to say? The cillin - the forgotten graves of unbaptised children in Ireland, rejected by the church, and dug by their bereft parents - and the ultimate fate of many of those lost at Grenfell Tower make for particularly difficult reading. One such is a patch of wasteland on the edge of a Belfast golf course where Roman Catholic doctrine dictated that un-baptised babies be buried in unconsecrated ground in unmarked graves.

Additionally, the idea that a tombstone should also have a death is fascinating because the words become harder to read, and other signs of decay match with the idea of grief fading over time.He is the author of the non-fiction collections Daunderlust and The Passion Of Harry Bingo, the latter shortlisted as non-fiction book of the year at the Saltire Society literary awards.

Ian Parsons has spent several years living permanently in Extremadura and now splits his time between his native county of Devon and his beloved vulture landscape, where he leads bird tours introducing people to the birds and the area he clearly loves. What is striking and surprising, however, is the way in which a book such as this is also life-affirming. A quick Google would have corrected that for him but he clearly didn't bother putting the effort in, and that, in a nutshell, is what a lot of the book felt like. It's very different from Sprackland's spare elegance, less restrained and more sprawling, less elegiac and more full of gusto, sometimes jokey and interested, as a good journalist would be in the varieties of human life and death to be encountered around graveyards.And the nature of his subject means that Ross takes readers through art, literature, popular music, theatre, sentimental stories, the comic and the weird. Back in England, he investigates what happened to conscientious objectors killed in wartime and travels around northern France with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. I fought back tears as he learned about cillini (pronounced killeeni), the little burial grounds, usually unmarked, found all over Ireland.