Eavesdropping on Myself: An Outsider’s Boyhood in Glasgow

In Eavesdropping on Myself Norman chronicles his boyhood in Glasgow and explores the push-pull of two cultures: working-class Glaswegian and first-generation Hebridean. This is Norman Maclean at his best - by turns sharp, funny and melancholic. The original lad o’ pairts, Maclean has a literary voice shaped, but never confined, by the places and languages of his youth. Eavesdropping on Myself finds him picking over his childhood with an unsparing eye. We knew he was a master storyteller; only now are we getting the measure of his own story. No reader could forget it, by Fraser MacDonald. Norman Maclean is one of the most resonant voices in Scotland. With one voice he articulates the tangled dualities of Scottish experience today: of tradition and modernity, highland and lowland, rural and urban, working class and middle class, local and worldly. His perspective straddles different classes, different languages and different lives, at once divided and unified. If Norman is speaking, then we should be listening, by Jamie Chambers.