Mayflies – From the author of the Sunday Times bestseller Caledonian Road

Our summary description

As Independent Scottish booksellers, we write all of our descriptions personally, we hope you enjoy this one.

Mayflies traces a friendship that begins with intensity and promise. In the summer of 1986, James meets Tully Dawson, a force of charisma and certainty who seems to know exactly how life should be lived. Bonded by music, films and a hunger for something beyond their small Scottish town, they head to Manchester for a weekend that feels limitless, set to the pulse of a defining soundtrack.

That trip becomes a turning point. A promise is made to live boldly, to refuse the ordinary, and to stay true to the people they are in that moment. Time, however, moves on. Lives diverge, choices harden, and ideals are tested.

Three decades later, a phone call pulls James back into the orbit of the friend who shaped him. Mayflies is a novel about loyalty, memory and the cost of living as you once believed you would. Tender and unsparing, it captures how friendships endure, fracture and change us forever.