Five plays from the the makar (national poet) of Scotland, one of the country's best-known (and best-loved) living playwrights.

Liz Lochhead is the author of many highly inventive original plays, adaptations and translations, all crafted with her special blend of the vividly colloquial and the energetically poetic. This volume brings together five of her best original plays ranging over three decades and several, contrasting styles.

Her first play, Blood and Ice (1982), is about the creation of Frankenstein, and weaves a spider's web of connections between the literary monster and Mary Shelley's own turbulent life.

The modern classic Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off(1987) retells the familiar tale of enmity between Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots, with Lochhead's own brand of ferocious iconoclasm and boundless wit.

Quelques Fleurs (1991) is a portrait of a marriage, both funny and tragic, and told through interlaced monologues.

The last two plays, Perfect Days (1998) and Good Things (2004), mark a woman's fear of turning, respectively, forty and fifty. In the first, Barbs, 39, a celebrity hairdresser, determines to do something to drown out the ticking of her biological clock. In the second, Susan, 49, sets out to find love the second (or is it third or fourth?) time round…

This rich collection of plays carries a new and candid introduction by the author, specially written for the volume.

'Funny, feisty, female, full of feeling… Liz Lochhead possesses the deeply Scottish qualities of independence,inquisitiveness and inventiveness' Carol Ann Duffy