Daughterhood

About the Book: 

Now, aged 46, with the menopause pestering her like a clanking door in a gale, she wasn’t sure how to proceed.

Nina Polmont has turned into her own worst auditor. The on-off ex is out, her sister is back from New Zealand and her step-daughter has come home. At the same time her parents’ marriage is falling apart, her niece has estranged herself and the music teacher who broke her heart thirty years ago suddenly wants to see her. Add hormones. Add night sweats. Add desire. And add the sinking feeling that she has made a catastrophic mess of her life. Is it ever too late to start again?

As past desires clash with new obligations and a midlife surge of rebellion and regret takes over, Nina tries to work out who has betrayed her more – her sister or her heart.

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.