ABOUT
THE BOOK

Hugh Bawn was a Modernist hero. A dreamer, a Socialist, a man of the people, he led Scotland’s building programme after the war. Now, he lies on a bed on the eighteenth floor. The times have changed. His flats are coming down. The idealism he learned from his mother is gone. And even as his breath goes out he clings to the old ways. His final months are plagued by memory and loss, by a bitter sense of his family and his country, who could not live up to the houses he built for them.

Hugh’s grandson, Jamie, comes home to watch over his dying mentor. The old man’s final months bring Jamie to see what is best and worst in the past that haunts them all, and he sees the fear of his own life unravel in the land that bred him. He tells the story of his own family – a tale of pride and delusion, of nationality and strong drink, of Catholic faith and the end of the old Left. It is a tale of dark hearts and modern houses, of three men in search of Utopia.