This Road is Red

Shortlisted for the Saltire Society First Book of the Year award 2011.

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About the Book: 

It is 1964. Red Road is rising out of the fields. To the families who move in, it is a dream and a shining future.

It is 2010. The Red Road Flats are scheduled for demolition. Inhabited only by intrepid asylum seekers and a few stubborn locals, the once vibrant scheme is tired and out of time.

Between these dates are the people who filled the flats with laughter, life and drama. Their stories are linked by the buildings; the sway and buffet of the tower blocks in the wind, the creaky lifts, the views and the vertigo.

This Road is Red is a compelling and subtle novel of Glasgow.

Reviews: 

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. 
 
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 as a trainer for the Scottish Book Trust’s Reading is Caring programme, training carers and health professionals to use shared reading with people living with dementia.