Busted Scotch

This collection of 35 short stories—most of them being published in this country for the first time—has been selected and arranged by James Kelman himself from over two decades of his work.

The stories of Busted Scotch are set in the working-class milieu of Scotland and England—the pubs, betting shops, tenements, bedrooms, snooker parlors, and decaying industrial workplaces. They range widely in length from a few paragraphs to twenty-plus pages, in style from the deceptively offhand to the highly farcical, and in subject matter from the casual everyday tragedies to the heartbreaking vicissitudes of romance and language.