Book description
'Confidently-written, warm and accessible... a fun and pacey book'
- The Herald 'This is a laugh-out-loud, feel-good story which demands
a follow-up *****' - News of the World It's 1975 and Britain is a
country in political flux. In Glasgow the dirty old Victorian slums
have been razed to the ground, replaced with brand new slums twenty
storeys high. Chips are a health food and the very mention of filet
mignon would spark a riot on the Govan Road. As its citizens struggle
to adapt to their changing world, they wonder what will replace the
steel mills and the shipyards, whether they look stupid in flares and
what the lyrics of the Bay City Rollers' 'Shang-A-Lang' actually mean?
Ten-year-old Steve Duff longs to be poor and neglected like his friend
Wally, whose parents are incapable drunks. Frustratingly for Steve,
he's saddled with a conventional, stable and middle-class family.
Then, over the course of a year, his father has a fling with a barmaid
and leaves home, his mother's response is to start a psychology
degree, his sister is arrested for demanding money with menaces and
his brother gets a girl pregnant. As if the normal indignities of
growing up weren't bad enough...This is a funny touching and
heart-warming debut novel that will strike a chord with anyone who has
been an awkward kid at least once in their life.
Carlos Alba is a journalist who has worked in Scotland for the past
17 years. He was editor of The Sunday Times (Scotland) since September
2006 after five years as deputy editor. Prior to that, he was Scottish
political editor of the Daily Record and education correspondent at The
Herald. He has won five Scottish Press awards. He is the author of
Kane's Ladder, also published by Polygon.
eBook, Published by Faber Factory
(01 May 2011)
