It is the last decade of the 20th century. London-based writer and single father Kevin Previn returns to his native Glasgow after an absence of ten years, his homecoming prompted by the death of a friend and mentor, junkie writer Mike Illingworth, author of The Book of Man.
Previn believes he is trawling the streets of Glasgow in order to make sense of his old friend's life and death, but he is on a personal journey, a quest to understand his own childhood brutalities, mental breakdown and lost loves, and the terrifying control the state can exert over the individual. Past and present become one as Previn discovers what he has really left behind.
Chosen by the American Library Association as a best book of 1995, this cult Scottish novel takes a savagely uncompromising and unsentimental look at the true nature of love and friendship in a city that, like its troubled characters, has lost all its old certainties. |
