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Author: Williams, Gordon M.

Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)

Published on 29 May 2025 by PAN MACMILLAN (Picador) in the United Kingdom.

Paperback | 352 pages
196 x 130 x 23 | 242g

SHORTLISTED FOR THE FIRST EVER BOOKER PRIZE’A masterpiece . . . demands to be read’ – Douglas Stuart, author of SHUGGIE BAIN’An extraordinary novel’ – Michael Magee, author of CLOSE TO HOMEIt’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.

With an introduction by James Robertson