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’s life is changing.

The on-off ex is gone, 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 own heart.

Reviews: 

Insightful and entrancing … Culminating in a 'final act of love', and boasting the most iconic pair of squabbling sisters since Fleabag, it’s an astute, intelligent examination of a fragile web of interconnected relationships that’s constantly teetering on the brink of collapse with only love and good intentions to hold it together. ALASTAIR MABBOTT, THE HERALD

Full of humour, beauty, and descriptions so vivid you feel like you’re there (hello, coil insertion scene), I enjoyed every moment I spent with Nina and her scattered family. LAURA PEARSON, Instagram

Frank and forthright, yet beautifully observed, Daughterhood delves into family dynamics of every shape, and will make you question: whose needs really come first? KAREN CAMPBELL, author of Paper Cup

A brutally honest depiction of a woman in midlife crisis, which has rarely been so honestly examined and portrayed. ALISTAIR BRAIDWOOD, SNACK MAG

Intelligent, intense and intimate, Daughterhood is the book for every woman entering the middle phase of her life, regardless of her circumstances. And those outside those parameters would find it enlightening, educational and engaging too! Daughterhood is real life, beautifully written and exposed on the page. I loved it. LINDA HILL, Linda's Book Bag 

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 moved to Glasgow in 2005 to study an MLitt in Creative Writing at Glasgow University, where she gained a distinction, and has lived in Glasgow ever since. 

She writes fiction and creative non-fiction. Her debut novel This Road is Red was shortlisted for the Saltire First Book of the Year award. Her second novel Cat Step was a BBC Radio 4 Open Book Editor’s Choice. Her non-fiction book Barrowland: the inside story of Glasgow’s beloved ballroom was published in 2025.
 
Alison was Highly Commended in the 2024 Wigtown Book Festival Anne Brown Essay Prize for her non-fiction essay on Cumbernauld Town Centre. She has been the recipient of a Scottish Arts Council New Writer’s Award as well as Creative Scotland funding to support several writing projects. Her writing has been published widely including New Writing Scotland, Gutter, Mslexia, The Herald, The Guardian and The Big Issue. 
 
She is the writer in the artist collective Recollective www.recollective.org.uk and works regularly with photographer Chris Leslie and illustrator Mitch Miller. 
 
Alison lives with her husband and two of her three daughters and works for the ALLIANCE on their Scotland Preventing Gambling Harms programme.