Andrew O'Hagan

That had been abolished by the time we were young men.

And our children, on the other hand, meet people through social media, and we were too early for that.

So there's a kind of, what I think of as Thatcher's children in the middle, where we met people at bus stops and in youth clubs and in record shops and in cafes.

And it's a whole world of...

difference to that, that there was a lot of human contact and uncertainty.

Often you'd turn up at a place and there was nobody there.

You'd arrive at a pub hoping to have a meet-up and there was nobody around.

It was just a way of life and a way of friendship which has slightly disappeared.

And I wanted to write a novel that depended on all the truths of that world.

It takes a whole culture to make any good novel.

And the whole culture there is

was Scotland in the 1980s and then what happened over 30 years.

Popular culture was always at the very centre of it for us.

I mean, music was our currency.

It was our language.

The things we had in common were movies, music.

You know, we could sit and discuss a novel all night, smoking cigarettes and listening to John Peel's famous Radio 1 radio show.

That was our culture.

And yet I had never found that culture in a book before.

with the exactitude that I think readers enjoy.