Swing Hammer Swing!

Our summary description

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

In the Gorbals, Tam Clay lives through the last days before the demolishers move in. Over the course of a single week, he chronicles a life lived amid collapse, where buildings are coming down and the old world is already half gone.

Tam moves through intersecting friends, old timers and eccentrics, negotiating his pregnant wife, frisky bedfellows, and debt collectors. The days are busy with dodging, desire, and hard talk, and the streets around him feel derelict, unsettled, full of people making do in the gaps. His week becomes an odyssey of self discovery, not clean or improving, but restless and exposed.

Set in a pulverised 60s Glasgow, this is described as wildly funny and outlandish, crammed to the crevices with ambition, and shaped by a long, obsessive act of making.