How Late It Was, How Late

Summary

After a weekend bender and a beating from the Glasgow police, an unemployed ex-convict wakes up blind and must navigate the city's bureaucracies and his own circling thoughts. Kelman renders everything from inside Sammy's working-class Scottish vernacular, a relentless interior voice that refuses the polite cadences of standard literary English. The novel is a fierce argument for the dignity and complexity of voices the mainstream novel has often kept off the page.