Scabby Queen – A Scotsman book of the year

Our summary description

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

Three days before her fifty-first birthday, Clio Campbell dies by suicide in a friend’s spare room. She leaves behind a life that resists tidy explanation. A one-hit-wonder musician, a political activist, a lover who moved between devotion and refusal, Clio lived loudly and without apology, even when the cost was high.

As the news travels, her story unfolds in fragments. Memories surface from the Isle of Skye, from squats and protests, retreats and rented rooms, from Glasgow on the night of the independence referendum when conviction and uncertainty collided in the streets. Those who knew Clio remember her differently, but none doubt the force of her presence or the difficulty of living alongside it.

Scabby Queen is a sharp, restless novel about a woman who would not soften herself to fit expectation. It is also a portrait of a country caught between ideals and compromise, watching its own reflection fracture over time. The book refuses consolation, choosing instead honesty. What remains is anger, love, and the uncomfortable truth that some lives are shaped by resistance, even when resistance offers no safe place to land.