The Good Daughter

About the Book: 

The Good Daughter follows 46-year-old Nina Polmont, who has dedicated her life to caring for her distant mother and navigating her sister Kate’s fallout with her own daughter. When a midnight message from her first love disrupts her routine, Nina is compelled to confront the dreams she set aside and the loyalties that bind her. As old desires clash with new obligations, she must decide whether to remain the dutiful daughter or risk everything for her own happiness.

With a family dynamic in turmoil, including a mother who won’t leave her room and a father’s affair, Nina’s journey explores the complexities of love, duty and self-discovery.

This poignant domestic drama resonates with anyone grappling with familial ties and personal aspirations. Candid and heartfelt, The Good Daughter is an essential read for book clubs and fans of contemporary fiction, offering profound insights into the challenges of motherhood, sisterhood and menopause.

Reviews: 

Praise for This Road is Red:

In 'This Road Is Red', Alison Irvine does for Glasgow what Irvine Welsh has done for Edinburgh - imagining a city through its fringes, fearlessly and without frills. In fact, 'This Road Is Red' goes one better than 'Trainspotting' by bringing to life a whole scheme in the sky, not through the interconnected tales of a handful of individuals, but by opening a hundred windows onto a whole community across two generations, so that the reader can hear a town talking on every page. Her book is publicised as a novel but plays with the conventions of non-fiction, including what appear to be direct testimonials of people who first lived in the flats when they were erected in 1964, to those at the end. It s a combination that works well... - THE HERALD

It sounds odd to talk of a book providing an obituary for a housing scheme, but in many ways that is exactly what This Road is Red is doing: and in the process helping record a way of life that is about to disappear. - UNDISCOVERED SCOTLAND

This is a beautifully written tale of life in a high-rise housing scheme . . . Alison Irvine's first book is a fine tribute to the people of the Red Road and a great account of how human solidarity can prevail in even the bleakest circumstances. - THE SOCIALIST REVIEW - WILLY MALEY

Irvine's stories are by turns sad, frightening, moving, dark, occasionally wickedly funny and always compelling. -The Morning Star

About the Author:

ALISON IRVINE was born in London to antipodean parents. She was brought up in London and Essex and moved to Glasgow in 2005 to study an MLitt in Creative Writing at Glasgow University. She graduated with distinction in 2006 and since then her writing has been published in The Celtic View and in an anthology of Glasgow writing, Outside of a Dog. In 2007 she was awarded a Scottish Arts Council New Writer's Bursary to support the writing of her novel about emigration from Glasgow to the Antipodes. Alison works as an actress and drama workshop facilitator. She lives in Glasgow.