BLEAK

Best First Book of the Year, Scotland's National Book Awards 2021. An entertaining Scottish memoir of rain, biting bugs, and minor humiliations, lightened with music, booze, dry humor and an array of eccentric characters.

R.M. Murray has a story. Quite a few of them. Of seasickness, hangovers, the wrong kind of weather. Of the joy of woe, and disappointments fairy-lit with hope. From fishing in the endless rain on the Isle of Lewis to performing in a punk band with Craig Ferguson and Peter Capaldi at Glasgow's famous School of Art. A stargazer, looking through the wrong end of the telescope.

This is a memoir... of sorts. A join-the-dots journey through a life. A series of vignettes and minor personal fables. If it were a wine it would be very dry with an insolent nose and a desperate finish. Complex but approachable. And affordable.

R.M. Murray is Head of Visual Art & Literature at An Lanntair Arts Centre in Stornoway, on the Isle of Lewis. Having grown up on Lewis, he studied in Aberdeen and then at the Glasgow School of Art―where he was in a punk band with Craig Ferguson and Peter Capaldi―before returning to Stornoway.