Whether viewed as an exciting pilot episode or a gripping series finale, the independence referendum of 2014 is the dominant showpiece of contemporary Scotland. Not quite ‘over’, its endings, beginnings and deferrals colour every aspect of cultural and political life and dominate the horizon of recent national history (and projected futurity). This chapter explores how the key political event of the past decade has been novelised, and how the rhetorical and experiential qualities of ‘indyref’ have been registered in Scottish fiction. The novels I will discuss are (in order of publication) Craig A. Smith's The Mile (2013), Effie Deans's An Indyref Romance: Harmony and Dissonance (2015), Allan Cameron's Cinico; Travels with a Good Professor at the Time of the Scottish Referendum (2017), Mary McCabe's Two Closes and a Referendum (2017) and Kirstin Innes's Scabby Queen (2020). The first and last of these books have a degree of distance from September 2014. The Mile was written during indyref's long phony war (2011–13), just prior to the events it imagines, while Scabby Queen employs a clear narrative remove from the fervours of indyref, whose central character moves through a broader world of British and European radical politics. (Indyref is only one political drama among several in the life and myth of Clio Campbell.)

Partly in the spirit of aggregation a referendum involves – and, as I will argue, the vision of political community it tends to enforce and reproduce – I have clumped these novels into two rough groups. I deal first with ‘Indyref Novels’ that feel immersed in the passions and slogans of 2014 (The Mile, An Indyref Romance, Two Closes and a Referendum), and second with more distanced and ironical ‘Fictions of Indyref’ that treat the ‘festival of democracy’ more as a play of narrative, propaganda and self-performance (Cinico, Scabby Queen). Novels in these two camps manifest distinct cultures of argument and rationalisation and, through them, disparate models of democratic community and participation.