The McKernan Literary Agency & Consultancy Edinburgh

Featured TitleKane's Ladder

If you plugged Carlos Alba's first novel into the national grid it would keep the homefires burning for the rest of the year Andrew O'Hagan

Ten-year-old Steve longs to be poor and neglected like his friend Wally, whose parents are incapable drunks. But unfashionably for Steve, he’s saddled with a conventional, stable and middle-class family. Then, over the course of a year, his father has a fling with a barmaid and leaves home, his mother’s response is to start a psychology degree, his sister is arrested for demanding money with menaces and his brother gets a girl pregnant. As if the normal indignities of growing up weren’t bad enough...This is a funny, edgy novel about growing up in Glasgow in the seventies...

Publication date: March 2008
UK Publisher: Polygon/Birlinn