Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
"Swing Hammer Swing is a seriously good novel. Critics have rightly claimed that he does for Glasgow what James Joyce did for Dublin." --Stephen Pile, Daily Telegraph Following Tam Clay around the Gorbals slums of 1960s Glasgow, Torrington combines lyrical verve with dark comedy in this modern odyssey of self-discovery. Direct, aggressive, with an eye for a witty pun and an ear for Glaswegian dialect, Torrington bends language to his uncompromising will. A riotous urban picaresque, Jeff Torrington's comic novel marked a milestone in Scottish literature.
Synopsis
From the infamous Glasgow slum, the Gorbals, Tam Clay chronicles a week in his life, in the last days before the demolishers move in. Intersecting friends, old-timers and eccentrics, navigating his pregnant wife, frisky bedfellows and debt collectors, Tam stumbles through a derelict world on an odyssey of self-discovery. Wildly funny, outlandish and insanely ambitious - thirty years in the writing - Torrington's pulverised '60s Glasgow is crammed to the crevices with a blizzard of his unique and insatiable genius.