How Late it Was, How Late (a first printing 1st.issue dustwrapper)

Kelman, James

ISBN 10: 0436232928 / ISBN 13: 9780436232923

Published by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd,uk, 1994

About this Item

uk1st.edition.1st.printing/near fine hardback in vg dustwrapper-first issue-no booker mention but fading spine.

Seller Inventory # lllroomdscmcxm,x

Bibliographic Details

• Title: How Late it Was, How Late (a first printing 1st.issue dustwrapper)
• Publisher: Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd,uk
• Publication Date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0436232928
• ISBN 13: 9780436232923
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

This is the tale of a man whose life is in a mess. While drunk, he has a row with his girlfriend, is involved in a fracas with the police, and appears to go blind. But this is just the start. The novel won the 1994 Booker Prize.

Review

"Ye wake in a corner and stay there hoping yer body will disappear, the thoughts smothering ye; these thoughts; but ye want to remember and face up to things, just something keeps ye from doing it, why can ye no do it; the words filling yer head: then the other words; there's something wrong; there's something far far wrong; ye're no a good man, ye're just no a good man." From the moment Sammy wakes slumped in a park corner, stiff and sore after a two-day drinking binge and wearing another man's shoes, James Kelman's Booker Prize-winning novel How Late it Was, How Late loosens a torrent of furious stream-of-consciousness prose that never lets up. Beaten savagely by Glasgow police, the shoplifting ex-con Sammy is hauled off to jail, where he wakes to a world gone black. For the rest of the novel he stumbles around the rainy streets of Glasgow, brandishing a sawed-off mop handle and trying in vain to make sense of the nightmare his life has become. Sammy's girlfriend disappears; the police question him for a crime they won't name; the doctor refuses to admit that he's blind; and his attempts to get disability compensation founder in Kafkaesque red tape. Gritty, profane, darkly comic and steeped in both American country music and working-class Scottish vernacular, Sammy's is a voice the reader won't soon forget. --Mary Park