The Book of Man by Barry Graham

An American Library Association Best Book of 1995

Set in the Scottish Third World hidden inside the First, this novel takes a savagely uncompromising and unsentimental look at the true nature of love and friendship in a city that, like its troubled characters, has lost all its old certainties.

London-based writer and single father Kevin Previn returns to his native Glasgow after an absence of ten years, his homecoming prompted by the death of a friend and mentor, junkie writer Mike Illingworth, author of The Book of Man.

Previn believes he's trawling the streets of Glasgow in order to make sense of his old friend's troubled life and death, but he's on a personal journey, a quest to understand his own childhood brutalities, mental breakdown and lost loves, and the terrifying control the state can exert over the individual. Past and present become one as Previn discovers what he has really left behind.