★★★ SHORTLISTED FOR THE DUNDEE INTERNATIONAL BOOK PRIZE 2004 ★★★
★★★ Shortlisted for the Brit Writers Awards 2011 ★★★
★★★ Longlisted for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards 2012 ★★★
Starting with frenzied masturbation, kerb-crawling businessmen being blackmailed with Polaroid photographs and an ambitious plan to improve the Scottish national football team by having casual sex with Brazilian women, BOWLING BALL tells the story of unemployed anti-hero Dempsy and the turbulent relationships he has with his serial-shagging flatmate Ronnie and Ronnie’s cousin Chaz, an ill-tempered lunatic with a finger in every criminal pie in the city.
A series of inter-woven tales set in Glasgow, BOWLING BALL portrays a dark, harrowing side of everyday life in Scotland, including employment as a double glazing salesman in Glasgow’s most deprived council estate, an unsavoury sexual encounter with a middle-aged woman in a nightclub toilet whilst her husband is asleep in the next cubicle, and reluctantly proposing marriage to a girlfriend with a £9.99 friendship ring actually purchased with the intention of wooing a local prostitute.
The threat of violence hangs increasingly heavy in the air as the story continues, with Ronnie threatening to tell his cousin after Dempsy does a shit in a tub of vanilla ice-cream that Chaz subsequently eats believing it was chocolate-chip flavour. Shortly afterwards, Dempsy threatens to dish out some of the same medicine, with the discover that his flatmate may have got his under-age cousin Chantelle (Chaz' little sister) pregnant after a seedy liaison in a local cinema.
BOWLING BALL speeds towards a frantic climax, when Chaz's fiancée Donna dumps him after finding out he has been cheating on her with prostitutes, and Dempsy and Ronnie find out that Chaz has kidnapped a rival drug dealer and imprisoned him in his fridge-freezer. When the police also discover this shortly afterwards, Chaz goes into hiding. Increasingly frantic, he goes to beg for forgiveness from his now ex-fiancée Donna, leading to a tragic chain of events at the end of the novel in which one of the protagonists ends up dead, one heads off to prison on a murder charge and the other flies off to Torremolinos to enjoy the 18-30 holiday honeymoon that was booked earlier in the novel after the unintentional marriage proposal.
At over 90,000 words, BOWLING BALL is a full-length novel. SIDEWAYS MOVERS, the second book in the 'THREE REALISTIC HOLES' trilogy will be published in November 2014.
★★★ Shortlisted for the Brit Writers Awards 2011 ★★★
★★★ Longlisted for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards 2012 ★★★
Starting with frenzied masturbation, kerb-crawling businessmen being blackmailed with Polaroid photographs and an ambitious plan to improve the Scottish national football team by having casual sex with Brazilian women, BOWLING BALL tells the story of unemployed anti-hero Dempsy and the turbulent relationships he has with his serial-shagging flatmate Ronnie and Ronnie’s cousin Chaz, an ill-tempered lunatic with a finger in every criminal pie in the city.
A series of inter-woven tales set in Glasgow, BOWLING BALL portrays a dark, harrowing side of everyday life in Scotland, including employment as a double glazing salesman in Glasgow’s most deprived council estate, an unsavoury sexual encounter with a middle-aged woman in a nightclub toilet whilst her husband is asleep in the next cubicle, and reluctantly proposing marriage to a girlfriend with a £9.99 friendship ring actually purchased with the intention of wooing a local prostitute.
The threat of violence hangs increasingly heavy in the air as the story continues, with Ronnie threatening to tell his cousin after Dempsy does a shit in a tub of vanilla ice-cream that Chaz subsequently eats believing it was chocolate-chip flavour. Shortly afterwards, Dempsy threatens to dish out some of the same medicine, with the discover that his flatmate may have got his under-age cousin Chantelle (Chaz' little sister) pregnant after a seedy liaison in a local cinema.
BOWLING BALL speeds towards a frantic climax, when Chaz's fiancée Donna dumps him after finding out he has been cheating on her with prostitutes, and Dempsy and Ronnie find out that Chaz has kidnapped a rival drug dealer and imprisoned him in his fridge-freezer. When the police also discover this shortly afterwards, Chaz goes into hiding. Increasingly frantic, he goes to beg for forgiveness from his now ex-fiancée Donna, leading to a tragic chain of events at the end of the novel in which one of the protagonists ends up dead, one heads off to prison on a murder charge and the other flies off to Torremolinos to enjoy the 18-30 holiday honeymoon that was booked earlier in the novel after the unintentional marriage proposal.
At over 90,000 words, BOWLING BALL is a full-length novel. SIDEWAYS MOVERS, the second book in the 'THREE REALISTIC HOLES' trilogy will be published in November 2014.
