Cassie McCullough

But first, let's head to Glasgow and Manchester, Manchester, in the 1980s in Andrew O'Hagan's novel Maitland.

Andrew O'Hagan is a Scottish writer based in London.

He started out as one of the youngest ever editors of the London Review of Books and is now its editor at large, which seems to mean basically he can investigate and write about whatever he likes, from Afghanistan to the dark web and identity theft to the Grenfell Tower disaster.

Hate.

Yes, I mean, look, I did laugh out loud in the first half of this book too.

And yes, the second part is very moving.

Well, let's leave that big question aside for a moment, because as you've intimated, Andrew O'Hagan is an enormous presence in this book, even as a work of fiction.

So the narrator is Jimmy, or James, or he's called Noodles by the character Tully Dawson.

He's 18 years old.

He's been abandoned by his parents, essentially.

He's been left in their council flat.

Mum's buggered off back to where she grew up, the Aran Island, and Dad's disappeared.

Who knows where he's gone?

He says about it, Jimmy, this is, they had a slightly exaggerated sense of my self-sufficiency.

So...

He's a bit lost and he's being looked after by his best mate, Tully Dawson, and his mum, Barbara.

And one of the things, you know, that Tully says is, stay at mine if you like, my mum loves you.

So we understand how close they are from that.

opens with a description of Tully Dawson and his relationship with his father, who's nicknamed Woodbine, after the cigarettes that he smoked.

And Tully's dad is a sacked miner in Thatcher's Britain, and we're told he's a reluctant father who never cheered his son on when he came to the football field to watch the game.