ISBN-13: 978-1904246336
Published by Steve Savage Publishers Limited
A lively, humorous yet poignant novel about a group of young people in a small fishing town in the North-East of Scotland during their final summer before they leave to go to college. When the enigmatic and ultra-cool ‘Big J’ arrives, Robbie Strachan is drawn into J’s intrigue with a glamorous summer visitor, the American sculptress, Xanthe. The affair goes badly wrong and leads to tragedy. The lives of Robbie, Big J and their crowd will never be the same again.
Suitable for adult and young adult readers, the novel addresses key concerns such as fishing decline, ‘incomers’ and loss of identity – within a humorous, inventive – and often poignant – narrative.
Full of lively humour and evocative local detail and set against the drama of the red sandstone stacks and hidden beaches of the Scottish North East coast, soundtracked by seagulls, The Big J is an entertaining read. Readers have mentioned the filmic and visual quality of the writing in the novel and also the influence of Alain-Fournier’s ‘Le Grande Meulnes’.
‘I read this latest novel from the multi-talented Andrew Murray Scott with great interest and pleasure … Scott writes like a poet – and like a typical teenaged boy, but the two voices sit well together … I believed in all the characters – I’ve met most of them. I didn’t foresee the ending, but it was just right … Robbie and enigmatic Big J will stay with you for a long time.’
– Eileen Ramsay, Leopard Magazine
‘His characters are realistically full of life … describes the area so well you feel you are part of it … I was eager to find out what happened to Robbie and Big J and was stunned by an unexpected twist toward the end of the book. I would highly recommend you try this refreshing writing style.’
– Scots Independent
‘Scott easily captures the familiar claustrophobia of a group of bored teenagers trapped in a “grimy smudge on the rim of the North Sea” … an understated novel that combines humour with retrospective glances … of traumatic past events.’
– Press & Journal
‘No seaside idyll – a novel that lifts the lid on village life … the events that engulf Dounby … are not pretty and this is not the most comfortable of reads. These quaint North-East villages will never look the same to me again.’
– Maurice Fleming, Scots Magazine
 | Andrew ScottAndrew Murray Scott is a fiction writer based in Broughty Ferry on the sunny east coast of Scotland. His first novel, Tumulus, won the inaugural Dundee International Book Prize in 2000 and received warm reviews of the “vibrant new voice in Scottish fiction” variety and was described as “a tour-de-force”. Andrew has published five novels to date: Estuary Blue (2001) from the same publisher, Polygon, The Mushroom Club (2007), The Big J (2008) and In A Dead Man’s Jacket, Andrew’s first e-novel, which is available for both Kindle and Kobo e-readers. Previously a journalist and now a media professional, Andrew has also written a number of non-fiction book titles including biographies of counter-culture icon Alexander Trocchi, The Making of the Monster (1991, reprinted in 2012) and John Graham of Claverhouse, Bonnie Dundee (1989, reprinted 2000) the charismatic leader of the first Jacobite rebellion in 1689, whose letters Andrew also collected and edited for the Scottish History Society. Andrew also edited a collection of Trocchi’s unpublished writings, Invisible Insurrection: A Trocchi Reader, reprinted in 1996. He has written non-fiction books on the life and times of the city of Dundee including a popular and much-reprinted concise historical guide, Discovering Dundee, a post-war social history, Modern Dundee, a two-volume cultural history of the city, titled Dundee’s Literary Lives, as well as a quirky volume of 50 evocative 20th century photographs, The Wee Book of Dundee. |
