Swing Hammer Swing. This item is unavailable.Swing Hammer Swing

A riotous urban picaresque, richly laced with black humour, Jeff Torrington's comic novel marks a milestone in Scottish literature. 'This tale of a week in the life of Tam Clay, Gorbals slum-dweller, father-in-waiting and wordsmith manqué, is funny from beginning to end... As Tam stumbles through the drink-sodden world of the Gorbals underclass of the sixties, when a house in Castlemilk was an ambition, he embarks on a mini-odyssey of self-discovery while blinding the reader with literary legerdemain' - Ian Black, The Herald. Winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year Award.

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.