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MARJORIE MAYO recommends an accessible and unsettling novel that uses a true incident of death in the Channel to raise questions of wider moral responsibility
The Holy Man and Other Stories by Alexander Trocchi
Works by a neglected Scottish avant-garde writer reveal an acute eye for detail and formidable intelligence
MIK SABIERS wallows in a night of political punk and funk that fires both barrels at Trump
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz
SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
A New Awakening: Adventures In British Jazz 1966 - 1971, G3, and Buck Owens
JAMES WALSH is moved by an exhibition of graphic art that relates horrors that would be much less immediate in other media
“I THINK frankly that of what is interesting in the last, say 20 years in Scottish writing, I have written it all,” Alexander Trocchi remarked in 1962 in a now notorious spat with Hugh MacDiarmid at the Edinburgh Writers Conference.
Posterity has largely thought otherwise, Trocchi remaining a marginal cult figure in the history of 20th-century letters and barely warranting a mention in surveys of Scottish literature.
The works that comprise The Holy Man and Other Stories were originally compiled in a volume with the more apt title The Outsiders in 1961 along with his debut Young Adam, an existentialist mystery set on the canals outside Glasgow.
More from this author
Uniquely gripping visions of the hidden social, economic and spiritual forces at play in 20th-century Edinburgh
Calum Barnes looks at the books that are making sense of our darkest days
It's difficult not to draw parallels between the insurrectionary attempt to overthrow the Scottish government in 1820 and today, says CALUM BARNES
The truth about the life of Argentine Trotskyist J Posadas is indeed stranger than fiction
