From Scenes Like These

THE REDISCOVERED 20TH CENTURY SCOTTISH CULT CLASSICSHORTLISTED FOR THE FIRST EVER BOOKER PRIZEINTRODUCED BY JAMES ROBERTSONIt’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.'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