Born Free ("Rebel Inc" S.) - Softcover

Hird, Laura J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0862419085 ISBN 13: 9780862419080

Publisher: Rebel inc., 1999

Synopsis

A novel of intertwined adolescent and mid-life crises, coming together in the family from hell. Jackie is 15 years old and boy-crazy; Jake hates his sister; Angie, a former alcoholic is having an affair; and her husband Vic is trying hard to keep the family together.

About this title

Review

"It's probably easier to be born free when you live on a massive nature reserve in the middle of Africa and have lions for pets." Easier, anyway, than when you live in an Edinburgh tenement with a neurotic dog: "Dad was engaged to a lassie called Jan, before he met Mum. He was only allowed to get a dog on the condition he got a bitch and called her that, because in Mum's opinion, well, you know?"

Jake is a computer games obsessive whose other hobbies include 1)tormenting a teacher who wears "revolting tight trousers that make his balls look like a ballet dancer's" and pungent aftershave and, therefore, must be gay and 2) masturbating over defaced pictures of Kate Moss in his mum's old issues of Marie Claire. Older sister Joni is 15, shoplifts from British Home Stores (because it's easy), skives off school, alternately envies and falls out with best mate Rosie and is desperate to lose her virginity before she hits 16. Mum (Angie) is a frowsy, late-thirty-something who snores, works in a bookies and suspects that her (younger) manager Raymond just might be flirting with her. And Dad (Vic) is a gentle hippy of a bus driver who missed out on university because Angie got pregnant, is helpless in the face of his children's teenage angst, his wife's mid-life crisis and who can't get it up.

Narrated by each family member in turn (the characterisation is superb, the voices pitch-perfect), Laura Hird's accomplished debut novel is a cross between James Kelman's Busconductor Hines, Alan Warner's Morvern Callar and the Pogues' Fairytale of New York. The result is a gritty, witty, eventful and surprisingly warm-hearted tale. --Lisa Gee

Review

"The writing is of a high quality and puts across a powerful sense of claustrophobia and quiet desperation." (The Observer)

"It's desperately readable, blackly comic and painful, a delight born of dysfunction." (The Times)

"Born Free confirms Laura Hird as one of Scotland's most talented writers. This bleak tale of urban dismay, set in the badlands of Edinburgh, is a work of considerable force and maturity - Hird organises her material with confidence and style - The novel's final 50 pages are a memorable descent into the dark mires of the human spirit, yet the book ends with a spark of optimism." (Daily Telegraph)

"Born Free exhibits a maturity that suggests Hird has emerged from the coat-tails of her peers and has ceased to play the literary wee sister - she manages to carry things off with aplomb - Hird's portrayal of a woman in alcoholic free-fall is uncomfortably accurate - shifts with ease from the screamingly funny to the gut-wrenching - thought provoking and entertaining." (The Scotsman)

Edition details

• Publisher: Rebel inc.
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0862419085
• ISBN 13: 9780862419080
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304