New Releases by James Kelman

Na zijn vrijlating uit de gevangenis wordt een Engelsman blind als gevolg van een incident met de politie, wat echter moeilijk te bewijzen is.

Un desafecto plasma el mundo de Patrick Doyle, un profesor de secundaria de Glasgow próximo a la treintena, en cuadros que describen una semana de su vida en crisis. Pero la crisis de Patrick no es sólo la crisis de los treinta.

Patrick Doyle is a 29-year-old teacher in an ordinary school. Disaffected, frustrated, and increasingly bitter at the system he is employed to maintain, Patrick begins his rebellion, fuelled by drink and his passionate, unrequited love for a fellow teacher. This is an apparently straightforward story of one week in a man''s life in which he decides to change the way he lives. Under the surface, however, lies a brilliant and complex examination of class, human culture, and character written with irony, tenderness, enormous anger, and, above all, the honesty that has marked James Kelman as one of the most important writers in contemporary Britain.

Living in a no-bedroomed tenement flat, coping with the cold and boredom of busconducting and the bloody-mindedness of Head Office, knowing that emigrating to Australia is only an impossible dream, Robert Hines finds life to be ¿a very perplexing kettle of coconuts¿. The compensations are a wife and child, and a gloriously anarchic imagination. The Busconductor Hines is a brilliantly executed, uncompromising slice of the Glasgow scene, a portrait of working-class life which is unheroic but humane.