Swing Hammer Swing!

Jeff Torrington’s Swing Hammer Swing! is less a conventional story than a week spent inside the wildly inventive mind of Thomas Clay, an unemployed would-be writer wandering through the Gorbals as his pregnant wife waits in hospital. Around him, the old neighbourhood is being demolished, its residents scattered and its history reduced to rubble.

I loved the sheer energy of Torrington’s language. Thomas turns everything he encounters, from condemned tenements and failing cinemas to drink, religion and family arguments, into jokes, wordplay and strange flights of imagination. He can be selfish and infuriating, but his voice makes even the bleakest moments feel alive.

Funny, sprawling and full of sadness beneath its swagger, this is Glasgow fiction at its most uncompromising. The city is disappearing before Thomas’s eyes, and his constant storytelling feels like an attempt to preserve it before the demolition hammers finish their work.