Greenvoe by George Mackay Brown — The definitive Orkney novel. Mackay Brown, born and lived in Stromness all his life, paints a small Orkney island community over a single week, layering history and present life into a hymn for a way of living about to be disrupted by an outside development. The standard against which all other Orkney writing is measured.
An Orkney Tapestry by George Mackay Brown — Part memoir, part essay, part imagined history. The best single book for understanding what Orkney has been and what its people make of themselves.
The Sea Road by Margaret Elphinstone — A historical novel about the Norse voyage to Vinland, narrated by Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir. Much of the early action takes place in Orkney during the Viking period, and Elphinstone's research and prose are both first-rate.
Beside the Ocean of Time by George Mackay Brown — Mackay Brown's last novel, a series of historical vignettes from different periods of Orkney history seen through the dreaming of one twentieth-century boy. Won the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year.
The Orkneyinga Saga — The thirteenth-century Norse chronicle of the earls of Orkney, blending myth, history, and political intrigue. Reads like a Game of Thrones source text and is essential background for almost everything in the islands.