“It was the day my grandmother exploded.”

A great opening line, and it made me stop my browsing in the bookshop to read on, a little curious. By the end of the first chapter, I was hooked and needed to buy the book. This coming-of-age story in rural Scotland is interwoven with social commentary and a family murder mystery. There were surprisingly lots of similarities with growing up in rural Ireland, and I found this book a really good read. Even if you did not grow up in rural Scotland (or Ireland), I think you’d still enjoy the book; you just might not get all the inside jokes or cultural references.

While I had heard of the author before, I always thought he wrote science fiction books that just didn’t work for me. This was my first time discovering that he wrote non-science fiction also, and I liked this book.