Swing Hammer Swing

by JeffTorrington (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1998

  $3.48

  Jeff Torrington's startlingly original first novel is set in Glasgow, Scotland, during a single-week in the late sixties. Christmas is approaching, and Thomas Clay is beset with mounting problems: his wife is in the maternity hospital prematurely; he's waiting for news of their transfer to Legoland high-rise housing - or for his tenement to be demolished beneath his very feet; he has no job, and his novel is, as yet, unpublished. Staggering from crisis to crisis, Thomas Clay is a man pursued - by petty gangsters, his Mafia-like in-laws, a doppelganger, and by time itself. He may imagine he has evaded the tyranny of clocks by escaping the nine-to-five, but no matter how fast he runs, the Grim Reaper seems cold on his heels.

• Used

  Paperback
  1993

  $3.48

  A riotous urban picaresque, richly laced with black humour, Jeff Torrington's comic novel marks a milestone in Scottish literature. 'This tale of a week in the life of Tam Clay, Gorbals slum-dweller, father-in-waiting and wordsmith manque, is funny from beginning to end... As Tam stumbles through the drink-sodden world of the Gorbals underclass of the sixties, when a house in Castlemilk was an ambition, he embarks on a mini-odyssey of self-discovery while blinding the reader with literary legerdemain' - Ian Black, The Herald. Winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year Award.