Say “Scotland”, say “Freedom!”, and you probably have an instant vision of Mel Gibson with blue paint on his face in the film Braveheart. Erase that image (if you can), and the next picture to swim into focus might well be Saltires in George Square, as September 2014 seethed with sunshine and debate on the Scottish referendum on independence. Or the words might conjure an empty glen with a vast blue sky, a stately stag on a distant purple mountain, an open road on which to walk.

When I wrote my novel Rise, I wanted to take all these images together and have Braveheart ride a deer through the shopping precinct of Sauchiehall Street. Well not quite, but you get the picture. By setting Rise among the standing stones of Argyll, but focusing on the run-up to the independence referendum, I was aiming to splice the ancient and the contemporary, and trying to capture a cresting wave in Scottish history. What I didn’t realise at the time was that a wave can herald a sea change, which continues to shape and redefine today.

Rise begins with a young woman called Justine, who is fleeing the city to the freedom of a new start – anywhere but the city will do. She hasn’t the slightest interest in politics; she reckons “normal folk” don’t. Life has taught her not to care, nor to root herself too deeply in any place or thing. But, hiding out in a small community, she realises it’s far harder to be anonymous than in a big city. In a country taking stock of itself, looking at the layers of its past and the blank page of its future, everything is up for being questioned, and Justine begins to think about freedom not in terms of escape, but in terms of living in a way that’s true to yourself.

Here are some of the books that I think Justine might have taken with her:

1. Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon

The story of Chris Guthrie, a quine from the Mearns of Kinraddie, is a Scottish classic. A bright and passionate girl whose life is limited by circumstance, Chris is also a metaphor for Scotland herself, for the struggles between the dirt of the land and the shine of the city, between cultural cringe and bone-deep belonging, and all the torn and multiple identities we hold inside.

2. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

Another classic – but classics are classics for a reason. Freedom of thought, freedom of assembly, freedom of movement: imagine living in a world where such fundamental liberties were curtailed by the ruling class of the day. Imagine the notion of Big Brother, of state surveillance, of doublethink and doublespeak. Oh, wait … Well, at least we’ve still got the Human Rights Act. For now.

3. Joseph Knight by James Robertson

“No man is by nature the property of another.” So ran the argument in Knight v Wedderburn. Based on the true but little known story of an 18th-century African brought to Scotland as a slave, Joseph Knight illuminates a court case which essentially found that slavery was not recognised by Scots law. In Robertson’s hands, historical facts are woven lightly around a powerful piece of fiction.

4. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

It’s ironic that four walls and a closed door might be the most liberating thing of all. But, argues Woolf, to be intellectually free one requires financial and emotional independence too. In her wonderful, expansive rumination on what it takes to be a writer – and, God forbid, a woman – Woolf loops and soars through gardens, libraries and gleaming ivory towers; flitting in and out of minds as diverse as the Four Marys and Shakespeare’s unfortunate sister.

John Hurt (centre) as Winston Smith in the film Nineteen Eighty-Four. Photograph: MGM/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

5. How to Be Both by Ali Smith

There are two narratives here: a story about a modern girl coping with her mother’s death, and the tale of a forgotten 15th-century Italian artist. Playing with language and time, Smith explores which comes first: surface or depth; what we see or what we feel? Bending genders, stretching the limits of liberation, Smith plays with the concept of freedom so intensely that she frees the novel form itself, rendering it entirely arbitrary which story – and therefore which ending – comes first. And last.

6. The Last Act of Love by Cathy Rentzenbrink

If you love someone, set them free. A profound and honest account of the struggle that the writer and her family endured after her brother was seriously injured in a road accident. Never mawkish but deeply moving.

7. Germinal by Émile Zola

I read this in English at university when I was meant to be reading it in French. Given my bad French, I’m glad. The sense of claustrophobia, and how vividly and humanely Zola writes about the instinct that every creature has to break free from traps, has stayed with me. It’s the story of a mining family in 19th-century France. As you read, you can feel roots tugging you down, the weight of the earth above, and the push of seeds, reaching for the sun.

8. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

This meditation on the freedom of the open road also shows how your mind is at liberty to wander to strange and lovely places precisely when you’re engaged in repetitive, mindless rhythm. Having recently started running (again), I can relate to the experience of plodding perseverance interspersed with wee bursts of joy, and I love how Murakami uses it to reflect on his creative philosophy and the rhythms of his own writing life.

9. Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky

An incomplete novel set in occupied France, written by a woman whose voice was extinguished by the Nazis – yet lives on in an unfinished masterpiece. There can’t be any more poignant or eloquent tribute to freedom of expression than that.

10. The Poor Had No Lawyers by Andy Wightman

There has been a whole slew of new political classics arising from the Scottish independence referendum: Iain Machhirter’s Disunited Kingdom, Lesley Riddoch’s Blossom, Common Weal’s Book of Ideas. The Poor Had No Lawyers, which outlines the social and historical reasons why millions of acres of common land lie in private and often unaccountable hands, is a bible for the land reform movement, and reflects the current sense of enquiry and engagement in Scotland. Again and again, the same question is being asked: who holds the power and for whose benefit is it used?