Our Fathers Book

In his acclaimed debut The Missing, Andrew O'Hagan explored our dysfunctional society of inarticulate loners, drawing on his own family. Our Fathers goes the crucial step further, doing the same work but in unabashed novelistic form and it's just as successful, just as shattering in its direct honesty. Jamie Bawn returns from life in Liverpudlian exile to his home "valleys of mirth" in Ayrshire. He's brought back by his grandfather Hugh, nearing the end of his life high in a 24-storey tower block that once reached for the sky, but now plumbs the depths. Faced with Hugh's decline, Jamie comes to terms with his own father, one of those Scottish fathers "made for grief", whose children ran from them and endemic, proud self-pity: "Our fathers were all poor, poorer than our fathers' fathers." The elements of soap opera are all alarmingly present and correct--alcoholic father, masochistic mother--but O'Hagan never plays to the gallery: there's a warmth tempering his deliberate unsentimentality, reminiscent of the best cinematic work of Terence Davies. This is a book about lost dreams--not just of the Bawn family, but of the generations that put their trust in socialist solutions, in public housing, in ideas. A succinct, perfectly judged and ultimately moving debut. --Alan StewartRead More