Book description
Hugh Provan was a Modernist hero. A dreamer, a Socialist, a man of
the people, he led Scotland's towerblock programme after the war. Now
he lies on a bed on the eighteenth floor. The times have changed. His
flats are coming down. The idealism he learned from his mother is
gone. And even as his breath goes out he clings to the old ways. His
wife sings her Scots ballads to soothe him, yet his final months are
plagued by memory and loss, by a bitter sense of his family and his
country, who could not live up to the houses he built for them.
Meanwhile the corruption hearings bring their hammer down on the past.
Hugh's grandson, Jamie, comes home to watch over his dying mentor. The
old man's final months bring Jamie to see what is best and worst in
the past that haunts them all, and he sees the fears of his own life
unravel in the land that bred him. He tells the story of his own
family - a tale of pride and delusion, of nationality and strong
drink, of Catholic faith and the end of the old Left. It is a tale of
dark hearts and modern houses, of three men in search of Utopia.
Andrew O'Hagan has written a story which is a poignant and powerful
reclamation of the past and a clear sighted gaze at our relationship
with history, personal and public.
Andrew O'Hagan was born in Glasgow in 1968. His first book, The
Missing, was published in 1995 and shortlisted for the
Esquire/Waterstone's/Apple Non-Fiction Award. Our Fathers, his debut
novel, was shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize. His second novel,
Personality, was published in 2003 and won the James Tait Black Memorial
Prize for Fiction. In January of that year Granta named him one of the
'Best of Young British Novelists' and in April he received the E. M.
Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. He lives
in London.
