Eddie Cameron is a salesman for Rocklight Ltd., an electrical equipment firm in Glasgow, where he has been fiddling the firm's expenses. Eddie's life is in tatters – his wife hates him, and his violent temper has left his mistress teetering on the edge of sanity.
His face made a fist at the world. The twined remnant of umbilicus projected vulnerably. Hands, feet and prick. He had come equipped for the job. Newborn Conn Docherty, raw as a fresh wound, lies between his parents in their tenement room, with no birthright but a life's labour in the pits of his small town. But the world is changing, and, lying next to him, Conn's father Tam has decided that his son's life will be different from his own. Gritty, dark and tender,...
Winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize Charlie Grant, an intense young student at Glasgow University watches his father die. Overwhelmed by the memory of this humble yet dignified death, Charlie is left to face his own fierce resentment for his adulterous mother. With shades of Hamlet and Camus, William McIlvanney's first novel is a revelatory portrait of youth, of society and of family.
Tom Docherty was seventeen in the summer of 1955. With school behind him and a summer job at a brick works, Tom had his whole life before him. Years later, alone in a rented flat in Edinburgh and lost in memories, Tom recalls the intellectual and sexual awakening of his youth. In looking back, Tom discovers that only by understanding where he comes from can he make sense of his life as it is now.
WINNER OF THE CWA SILVER DAGGER 'In a class of his own' Guardian 'Reads like a breathless scalpel through the bloody heart of a great city' Denise Mina Eck Adamson, an alcoholic vagrant, summons Jack Laidlaw to his deathbed. Probably the only policeman in Glasgow who would bother to respond, Laidlaw sees in Eck's cryptic last message a clue to the murder of a gangland thug and the disappearance of a student. With stubborn integrity, Laidlaw tracks a seam of...
These are the stories of the casualties of social and emotional struggle, who defy defeat with humour, resilience and inspiring faith in their dreams. The walking wounded. These are the stories of ordinary people.
In a Victorian mansion hotel on a Scottish island, a group of English Literature lecturers and students from Glasgow gather for a residential weekend. The weekend proves to be a major turning point in the emotional lives of several people – just not quite in the way any of them expected.
