SHORTLISTED FOR THE FIRST EVER BOOKER PRIZE’ A masterpiece . . . demands to be read’ – Douglas Stuart, author of SHUGGIE BAIN ‘An extraordinary novel’ – Michael Magee, author of CLOSE TO HOMEIt’s the west of Scotland in the 1950s.

New houses are going up. Factories are opening. But Dunky Logan, a 15-year-old brought up in a tenement flat in working-class Kilcaddie, is ditching school to be a labourer on a local farm.

Dead set on becoming a hard case, he wants to work shoulder to shoulder with so-called real men. Irish Catholic Mary O’Donnell arrives at the farmhouse as the new maid.

She is pregnant – no boyfriend in sight. But she’s smart, and she has a plan to get herself up in the world. As Dunky is swallowed up by a vicious cycle of violence, betrayal, and booze, Mary becomes entangled in a savage family feud. Now there’s no going back, not for either of them. With an introduction by James Robertson