A town so isolated that even moving to Glasgow seems impossible dream

Phoenix

£18.99

Cora Mowat is a difficult girl to figure out. A teenager from the coastal Fife town of Muircross in the mid-1990s, she’s kept her ADHD diagnosis secret, even though it would help people to understand why they have a hard time knowing what to make of her. She sees the world in her own unique way, and her condition causes her to speak before thinking and to act impulsively, without considering the consequences.

She lives with her disabled mother on a council estate, part of the forgotten masses populating declining Scottish towns, so isolated that even moving to Glasgow seems an unattainably glamorous dream. The only route to a brighter future that Cora and her friends can envision is to attach themselves to a man who’s on his way up and out.

Cora is taken aback when her mother’s new boyfriend is invited to come and live with them. Gunner, so named because his missing eye makes him look as though he’s sighting down a rifle, is something of a rough diamond. By his own admission, he isn’t cut out to be a dad, but he does try to treat Cora kindly and genuinely wants her to accept him into her home. But she soon finds out, to her dismay, that he’s a petty criminal who makes a living by shoplifting to order and selling the goods around town.

READ MORE

A story of doomed and very posh love from a scion of the Scots elite

Scots village Forvie was buried in 1413 during a nine-day sandstorm

In this highly accomplished debut, neurodivergent author Tom Newlands (who points out at the end that ADHD was virtually unrecognised and untreated at the time the novel is set) immerses us in Cora’s worldview, letting us see the extent to which, in the absence of guidance or role models, someone with her condition has to work out a path for herself. The tense but often tender relationship between her and Gunner is one of the novel’s strongest threads. Thrown together by circumstance, neither of them capable of slipping naturally into a father-daughter dynamic, they’re as clueless as each other, but battle on to find a way to relate to each other that works for them.

Similarly, her dreams of escaping the bleakness of her existence are held back by the fact that her only positive example is a schoolfriend’s older sister, who moved to Glasgow to stack shelves in a supermarket. Even those who seem to have got away still carry their past around with them in the form of drug addictions. Cora’s focus on the future is also hard for her to reconcile with her attachment to the past and her slowly dawning realisation that “being linked to people who remembered all the old versions of you was what living was actually about”.

Only Here, Only Now, by Tom Newlands (Image: free)

A move to the larger town of Abbotscraig, which is supposed to be a step up the housing ladder, proves to be just as restricting and hostile as Muircross. Rather than a ticket to the bright lights, her new boyfriend Fulton is an illiterate dropout surely destined never to leave the town of his birth but to stagnate in a life of petty crime and violence, like his grandfather before him.

It sounds terribly bleak, but there’s enough warmth and humour here to dispel the chill. Some of Cora’s mental connections are charmingly idiosyncratic, the grandfather’s translucent skin resembling “the bag off a hot sausage roll” and Fulton’s voice on the phone bringing to mind “a wee electronic talking prawn”. In only his first novel, Newlands has created a character who imprints herself indelibly on the memory, a working class Scottish voice that’s smart, quirky and highly distinctive.