Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-cream Float Before He Stole My Ma - Tapa blanda

"more than just one of the best debuts of the year; one of the best books of the year. It should do for Aberdeen what Trainspotting did for Edinburgh" (Louise Welsh Herald)

"'Trainspotting on a sugar rush' has been my pat description when recommending this spirited debut novel... a remarkable story of love and loyalty, of fierce passion and scabrous wit, full of characters whose broad vernacular is direct and expressive. This is about a culture with just as much right to be called British as that of middle-class suburbia" (Jonathan Ruppin Foyles Best Fiction of 2012)

"Despite the grinding poverty, drug addiction, alcoholism and violence, this isn't a relentlessly dark book. It's an honest one: honest about the things that go wrong and about the lives that people who don't often get to be the stars in fiction really do lead... [Hudson] gives us, without a shred of hipster cynicism, the hope and tough warmth for which she has such a sharp eye" (Jenn Ashworth Guardian)

"This is the poverty trap writ large, the authentic working-class experience in all the mess and glory of the giro queue, drug and booze dependency, and gallows humour... Kerry Hudson's early life was like this. What a brilliant thing to turn the chaos and trauma of a hectic childhood into a debut novel as colourful, funny, joyful and compelling as this" (Nicola Barr Observer)

"Kerry Hudson’s fine, eloquent debut novel traces the peripatetic childhood of Janie Ryan...her tale is full of warmth and bittersweet humour" (David Evans Financial Times)

Winner of the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust First Book Award; shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, the South Bank Sky Arts Awards and the Green Carnation Prize

When Janie Ryan is born, she's just the latest in a long line of Ryan women, Aberdeen fishwives to the marrow, always ready to fight. Her violet-eyed Grandma had predicted she'd be sly, while blowing Benson and Hedges smoke rings over her Ma's swollen belly. In the hospital, her family approached her suspiciously, so close she could smell whether they'd had booze or food for breakfast. It was mostly booze.

Tony Hogan tells the story of a Scottish childhood of filthy council flats and B&Bs, screeching women, feckless men, fags and booze and drugs, the dole queue and bread and marge sandwiches. It is also the story of an irresistible, irrepressible heroine, a dysfunctional family you can't help but adore, the absurdities of the eighties and the fierce bonds that tie people together no matter what. Told in an arrestingly original -- and cry-out-loud funny -- voice, it launches itself headlong into the middle of one of life's great fights, between the pull of the past and the freedom of the future. And Janie Ryan, born and bred for combat, is ready to win.