Staff Pick
Winner of the 1994 Man Booker Prize, How Late It Was, How Late follows the trials and tribulations of our main character Sammy after he unwisely picks a fight with some plainclothes police. Getting beaten senseless, literally, he wakes up the next day completely blind. Written in Kelman's inimitable style with an emphasis on the first-person stream-of-consciousness technique, Scottish literature is a law unto its own self and this book an example par excellence. Recommended By Fletcher O., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
One Sunday morning in Glasgow, shoplifting ex-con Sammy awakens in an alley, wearing another man's shoes and trying to remember his two-day drinking binge. He gets in a scrap with some soldiers and revives in a jail cell, badly beaten and, he slowly discovers, completely blind. And things get worse: his girlfriend disappears, the police question him for a crime they won't name, and his stab at disability compensation embroils him in the Kafkaesque red tape of the welfare bureaucracy. Told in the utterly uncensored language of the Scottish working class, this is a dark and subtly political parable of struggle and survival, rich with irony and black humor.
Synopsis
Winner of the Booker Prize: "A work of marvelous vibrance and richness of character."--
About the Author
James Kelman is the author of novels, plays, and essays, including Busted Scotch and You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free. He lives in Glasgow, Scotland.