Growing up in the west - Edwin Muir

Edwin Muir - POOR TOM, J.F. Hendry - FERNIE BRAE, Gordon M. Williams - FROM SCENES LIKE THESE, Tom Gallacher - APPRENTICE.

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 in a novel reminiscent of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Gordon Williams's novel tells a grimmer story as its young protagonist
eventually succumbs to a culture of drink and violence where the
harshness of life on the land sits next to industrial sprawl: 'From
scenes like these old Scotia's grandeur springs.' Set in the Clydeside
shipyards, the wryly observant and humorous style of Apprentice strikes a happier note from the 1960s.