Southpaw

Gilfeather has a voice, and it is entirely his own — sour, self-mocking, incapable of sentimentality even when the material invites it. The grandfather scene is the book's best proof: an old man, crippled from a mining accident, hacking a boy's hair off with 'blunt, rusty old scissors' before forcing a too-small kilt and 'a great big fuck-off yellow and red polka-dot' ribbon onto him and booting him out to the shops. It's cruel and it's funny and Gilfeather never signals which reaction we should have — he trusts the reader to hold both, which is a real discipline even inside all the noise.

The institutional detail throughout is where the prose earns its keep. The Borstal laundry room — 'the sound of the machines drowned out the sounds of the prisoners' screams' — is the kind of specific, unglamorous horror that a lesser misery-memoir would either skip or overplay. Here it just sits, flatly stated, and does its damage. Same with the shit-pellet mornings, the colouring books graduating to crosswords, the two-hour laundry-room wank sessions passed off as training. This is a writer who knows that the telling detail beats the editorial one.

The book is undisciplined in places — digressions run long, the misogyny and homophobia deployed as 'voice' occasionally curdle into something closer to authorial indulgence than character work, and Mrs Jones never rises above caricature. But the Dundee boxing club and Ridgley Borstal are rendered with enough lived texture that you believe the narrator was actually there, and that's not nothing.