How Late It Was, How Late

One sunny morning in Glasgow, Sammy, an ex-convict and sometimes shoplifter, awakens down a lane after a two-day drinking binge. Friday is a blur, and Saturday has disappeared altogether from his memory. Unwisely he gets into a physical altercation with some soldiers; when he next revives, he's in a jail cell, badly battered and — he slowly discovers — completely blind. And things don't get any better: His girlfriend has disappeared. The police are questioning him and playing every kind of cop game with his head. His stab at Disability ompensation catches him in the Kafkaesque coils of the welfare bureaucracy. Sammy's response to this wave of misfortune? "So okay, ye'vd had this bad time. Ye've lost your sight for a few days and it's been bad. Ye've coped, but ye've fucking coped."

Told in the utterly uncensored language of the Scottish lower classes, How Late It Was, How Late is a dark and subtly political parable of struggle and survival, a masterpiece of irony and black humor.

-- from dust jacket of Norton edition