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.

Andrew O'Hagan has written a story which is a poignant and powerful reclamation of the past and a clear-sighted gaze at our relationship with history. Our Fathers is a beautiful and profound book which announces Andrew O'Hagan as a novelist of great distinction.

Andrew O'Hagan was born in Glasgow. He is on the editorial board of the London Review of Books and is contributing editor to Granta. He writes for the Guardian. His previous book,'The Missing', was shortlisted for the Esquire Award, the Saltire First Book Award, and the McVities prize for Scottish Writer of the Year. 'Our Fathers' is his first novel.

 

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Here are some readers' thoughts on Our Fathers by Andrew O'Hagan:

 

"Hugh Bawn, an old socialist and housing activist, is visited by his grandson, Jamie, as he lies dying in his 18th floor flat in Ayrshire. Hugh believed passionately in the tower block solution to the post war housing crisis in Scotland's industrial heartland. Now in the chaos and failure of high rise housing Hugh's life's work is in ruins but he refuses to accept this. His son Robert, Jamie's father, was a bitter disappointment with no sense of his father's social commitment, a violent alcoholic who has long been abandoned by both father and son.

For Jamie the visit is a journey, sometimes painful, back in time to his early fraught childhood with his dysfunctional parents and his later move to the more secure haven of his grandparents home and his formative influences. He must confront his own ghosts, his apparent abandonment of his Scottish past in his move to the North of England, the true nature of his commitment to his girlfriend, Karen.

This is a tale of raw family emotions but it also poses the question of what constitutes personal fulfilment, the need for approbation and a sense of self worth.

This is a thoughtful intriguing book, sensitive and told in sometimes poetic language that brings the reader into the bleak landscape inhabited by the Bawns. This must be a very strong contender for the IMPAC Dublin Award."

Reader, Raheny Library Reading Group.