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SHORTLISTED FOR THE FIRST EVER BOOKER PRIZE
‘A MASTERPIECE. . . DEMANDS TO BE READ’ – DOUGLAS STUART, AUTHOR OF SHUGGIE BAIN
It’s the west of Scotland in the 1950s. New houses are going up. Factories are opening.
But Dunky Logan, a 15-year-old brought up in a tenement flat in working-class Kilcaddie, is ditching school to be a labourer on a local farm. Dead set on becoming a hard case, he wants to work shoulder to shoulder with so-called real men.
Irish Catholic Mary O’Donnell arrives at the farmhouse as the new maid. She is pregnant – no boyfriend in sight. But she’s smart, and she has a plan to get herself up in the world.
As Dunky is swallowed up by a vicious cycle of violence, betrayal, and booze, Mary becomes entangled in a savage family feud.
Now there’s no going back, not for either of them.
‘One of the finest British novels of its era. A landmark in postwar fiction. A brave and brilliant book’ – Liam McIlvanney, author of The Quaker
‘A devastating study of 1950s Scottish adolescence . . . a genuine lost classic just waiting to be rediscovered by a new generation of readers’ – DJ Taylor, author of Orwell: The New Life
With an introduction by James Robertson