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Buy Bleak
Roddy Murray has something to say. About a life full of mishaps, varied and various. Brushes with death he’d like to recount, truths and untruths he’d like to get off his chest. He’s no celebrity, but he has stories to tell. So this is a memoir… of sorts.
Of primary school corporal punishment, appalling seasickness and hung-over teenage days in the docks on the Isle of Lewis. Of being a Bastard from Hell punk and a Dreamboy with Peter Capaldi and Craig Ferguson at Glasgow School of Art. Of illegal firearms, vans with vendettas, dodgy boats and a spectacularly good potato peeler.
Murray is the embodiment of an essential human survival skill: our ability to laugh in the face of adversity, or even just embarrassment.
REVIEWS OF Bleak
"A heartwarming trip through the ruins of youthful delusion, much of which I don’t remember." Peter Capaldi
"The moors, a hamster perishing from hypothermia, the drinking habits of Glaswegian punks, the fascination with boxing, a sheep in a house, the outdoorsy tramping....the subjects are indeed bleak. But the writing is animated, curious, precise and horribly candid. Not bleak. Nor are the many incidental digressions and the constant wryness. Invigorating as a gallon of Lanliq with an Eldorado chaser." Jonathan Meades
“Here we have the trampings of a slight Chaplinesque figure whose fickle fate seldom tires of tripping him up.” Finlay MacLeod