Growing Up in the West

Four literary works portraying both the gritty beauty and the brutality of Glasgow and western Scotland in the mid-twentieth century.

Includes:
Poor Tom by Edwin Muir
Fernie Brae by J. F. Hendry
From Scenes Like These by Gordon M. Williams
Apprentice by Tom Gallacher

Introduced by Liam McIlvanney, award-winning author of The Quaker, Growing Up in the West presents four very different and memorably vivid accounts of what it was to be young and growing up in Glasgow and the west of Scotland, from the 1930s to the 1960s. Poor Tom tells of a young man’s struggle to come to terms with the slow death of his brother in the city slums of a culturally impoverished Scotland. Fernie Brae celebrates the growth and education of a sensitive youth in a novel reminiscent of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Gordon Williams’s novel From Scenes Like These tells a grimmer story as its young protagonist eventually succumbs to a culture of drink and violence in which the harshness of life on the land sits next to industrial sprawl. Finally, set in the Clydeside shipyards, the wryly observant and humorous style of Apprentice strikes a happier note from the 1960s.