Swing Hammer Swing!

byJeff Torrington

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From the infamous Glasgow slum, the Gorbals, Tam Clay chronicles a week in his life, in the last days before the demolishers move in. Intersecting friends, old-timers and eccentrics, navigating his pregnant wife, frisky bedfellows and debt collectors, Tam stumbles through a derelict world on an odyssey of self-discovery. Wildly funny, outlandish and insanely ambitious – thirty years in the writing – Torrington’s pulverised ’60s Glasgow is crammed to the crevices with a blizzard of his unique and insatiable genius.

A gamey, pungent, vulgar sprawl of a novel, somewhere in the hinterland where Damon Runyon meets James Joyce

Observer

About Jeff Torrington

Jeff Torrington (1935–2008) was born in the Gorbals, Glasgow. He had a wide-ranging career, working as a packing-case nailer, a cinema projectionist, a fruit-market porter, labourer, postman and as a fireman on the railways. He wrote novels and short stories, drawing on the changing face of modern Scotland.

His first novel Swing Hammer Swing! took 30 years to write and won the 1992 Whitbread Book of the Year Award.
Details
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • ISBN: 9781784870126
  • Length: 432 pages
  • Dimensions: 198mm x 26mm x 130mm
  • Weight: 299g
  • Price: £10.99
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