Kirjahaku

Duncan McLean is one of Scotland's liveliest fiction and non-fiction writers - this is his first volume of plays Julie Allardyce rushes into the theatre like a fresh breeze off the North Sea. It is loud and coarse-tongued and funny ...a play which opens doors and shoves the audience through into areas of new experience' (Scotland on Sunday); Blackden: 'Something of a revelation ...A gripping, ominous meditation on the strange disappearance of a young man in his prime, driven along by the hard, powerful lilt of McLean's Aberdeenshire Scots' (Scotland on Sunday); also included are Rug Comes to Shuv: 'nasty, brutish and hilarious ...fast, furious and foul-mouthed, it enriches the belly laughs with unexpectedly poignant undercurrents' (The Scotsman) and two other short pieces, One Sure Thing and I'd Rather Go Blind."A magnificent writer with liberal empathy for man's dark side" (Daily Telegraph)

Rob and Karen Catto are a newly married young couple settling into their lives together on the northeast coast of Scotland. Rob's job as a janitor at the local school involves him in both the lives of his students and issues of security. So he takes sharp notice of a hulking figure in a parka lurking around the edges of the school, leering through windows, squatting in an abandoned concrete bunker. As unpleasant, unsettling incidents multiply, Rob's suspicions tilt into obsession. It is time for a showdown. Time to confront Bunker Man... A powerful, terrifying tale of horror and breakdown from an extraordinarily gifted young writer - a smashing American debut.

Using the prize money from his Somerset Maugham Award, Duncan McLean traveled from Orkney, Scotland, to Texas in search of the extraordinary mix of jazz, blues, country, and mariachi that is Western Swing. This account of his travels takes in barbed-wire museums, onion festivals, hoe-downs, ghost-towns, dead dogs, and ten thousand miles of driving through the Lone Star State. A constant soundtrack of vintage music from bands like the Texas Top Hands, The Lightcrust Doughboys, and the Modern Mountaineers cheers McLean as he tries, with great difficulty, to track down any trace of his greatest heroes: Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. Both a quest for a musical grail and a wildly funny travelogue, Lone Star Swing captures the singular wonders of Texas and its maverick inhabitants, its staggering 100-in-the-shade heat, its mouth-blistering chilies. . . . Above all it captures the spirit of the glorious mongrel music-once incredibly popular, now all but forgotten-that he crossed the world to hear.

In this extraordinary collection of short stories, Duncan McLean shows us real life -- and real death -- in all its many guises. Equally adept at black farce, brutal rants, or tender epiphanies, McLean plunges us headlong into the lives of his characters: partying, and all it entails, with soccer enthusiasts; shivering inside the butcher's man-sized fridge; stumbling bloody-footed along the cliff-top path at midnight, lost in a liver'n'onions-fueled fantasy of sex and violence. The men and women in these stories are mostly unemployed or in dead-end jobs, often on the edge of madness or destruction; but just as often they are on the brink of simply leaving: walking away from relationships, responsibilities, and the reassurance of alcohol and aggression. Told with enormous skill, fierce humor, and a dark emotional drive, these stories are as various as the characters themselves. Their commonality derives from a merciless realism, and an almost fanatical adherence to the rhythms and cadences of spoken language. McLean wants to capture the unremarkable, but it is his remarkable stories which transport. Expressed here at last is a psychic disorder, so contemporary, so unsafe; here is swaggering, sneering, frustrated, self-scepticism on the pavement. -- Guardian (London) Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award

Duncan McLean has been called "Scotland's answer to Roddy Doyle" (Cosmopolitan), but he has his own unique, scruffy voice full of quirky humor and surreal images. In the highland town of Blackden, things have gotten overheated despite being overtaken by the chill of winter. Inside the head of eighteen-year-old Patrick Hunter, an auctioneer's assistant, the blood is boiling. Fueled by a potent mix of yankee doodle pie and beer, Patrick spends a November weekend on his own when his off-balanced mother goes to the city. Racing around the hills and dens of his hometown, he is half in escape from worn-out friends, drudging work, and painful memories, and half in pursuit of a girl, his father's ghost, and a new life. "Brilliantly funny: fast, sharp, constant banter, even when the narrator is only talking to himself." Times Literary Supplement "A hilarious and touching insight into the mind of a young man, balanced between naivety and maturity." The List"

A programme text produced with the National Theatre of Scotland to coincide with the UK tour, Aalst is a powerful and disturbing drama about two parents who murder their children. The play is based on real events from the Belgian town of Aalst in 1999 where the ensuing high profile and dramatic trial led to much soul-searching in the Belgian media. A young couple check into a hotel with their two small children. A week passes before the police make a chilling discovery. In 2005 Belgian theatre company, Victoria, dramatised the case, working from source material including statements and interviews, TV footage of the trial and a documentary on the murder investigation. Produced in theatres and festivals across Europe, Aalst has built a reputation as a powerful and complex piece of modern theatre which raises disturbing questions that have no easy answer.

Things can get overheated in a small Scottish town, even in the depths of winter. Outside it’s so cold they’re curling on the tennis court, but inside the head of Patrick Hunter, eighteen-year-old auctioneer’s assistant, the blood is boiling.Fuelled by a potent mix of stovies and beer, Patrick spends a November weekend racing around the hills and dens, half in escape from worn-out friends, drudging work and painful memories, half in pursuit of sex, laughs, a witches’ Sabbath, a message-bike handed down through the generations…and himself.Duncan McLean’s book of stories, Bucket of Tongues, received high praise for its ‘crisp snapshots of Scotland’s seamier side’ (The Face). His first novel is just as fast-moving, as painfully funny and as telling in its eye for the small details of speaking, eating, loving, playing and working that make up our lives. The characters are as lively as before, but less defeated, the humour is warmer, more generous, and the vision of contemporary rural life is enriched by an awareness of the past. Blackden is an outstanding novel by one of our most talented writers.