During Scotland's Year of Stories, we continue to celebrate the literary minds of NTSUSA Great Scots from years' past, Alexander McCall Smith and Denise Mina.

This prize includes two hardback copies of Alexander McCall Smith's Tiny Tales (keep one for yourself, and share another with a friend!) with an autograph, a signed privately printed pamphlet from McCall Smith titled The Waterfalls, Scotland and Everything, and an autographed copy of Denise Mina's newest novel, Rizzio.

In Tiny Tales, Alexander McCall Smith explores romance, ambition, kindness, and happiness in thirty short stories accompanied by thirty witty cartoons designed by Iain McIntosh, McCall Smith's longtime creative collaborator. Here we meet the first Australian pope, who hopes to finally find some peace and quiet back home in Perth; a psychotherapist turned motorcycle racetrack manager; and an aspiring opera singer who gets her unlikely break onstage. And, of course, we spend time in McCall Smith's beloved Scotland, where we are introduced to progressive Vikings, a group of housemates with complex romantic entanglements, and a couple of globe-trotting dentists. These tales and illustrations depict the full scope of human experience and reveal the rich tapestry of life-painted in miniature.

In Rizzio, the multi-award-winning master of crime, Denise Mina delivers a radical new take on one of the darkest episodes in Scottish history-the bloody assassination of David Rizzio private secretary to Mary, Queen of Scots, in the queen's chambers in Holyrood Palace. On the evening of March 9th, 1566, David Rizzio, the private secretary of Mary, Queen of Scots, was brutally murdered. Dragged from the chamber of the heavily pregnant Mary, Rizzio was stabbed fifty six times by a party of assassins. This breathtakingly tense novella dramatises the events that led up to that night, telling the infamous story as it has never been told before. Rizzio looks at a shocking historical murder through a modern lens-and explores the lengths that men and women will go to in their search for love and power. Rizzio is nothing less than a provocative and thrilling new literary masterpiece.

Generously donated by Alexander McCall Smith and Denise Mina