This first novel, set against a background of Scottish urban decay, won the Betty Trask Award in 1993. The death of his grandmother and his grandad's move to a home, leaves Danny in charge of their ancient pig. Their cottage become a haven for the boy and his Indian girlfriend.

Pig (Penguin Fiction)

Literature & Fiction

Cowan, Andrew

Contemporary

Penguin

Ashley teaches at a dispiriting school in a town where parked cars are vandalized. The novel centres around a father's love for his baby daughter whilst the community combine in a fight to save their common.

Common Ground

Penguin Books, Ltd.

With his wife, Jane, pregnant, Ashley must resign himself to impending fatherhood and decide whether to assume the values of his parents or shun society like his brother, in a poignant, witty story by the award-winning author of Pig.

British & Irish

Houghton, mifflin, harcourt

In a “coming-of-age story as strange and surprising...as The Catcher in the Rye” (New York Times Book Review), a fifteen-year-old boy must learn to live on his own and contend with the vagaries of romantic love and racial hatred.

Pig (Harvest Book)

Literary

Mariner Books

Crustaceans

It’s December and there is one foot of snow. Paul, the narrator, is driving east to the seaside in the imaginary company of his son, Euan, whose sixth birthday this would have been. As he drives, and later as he wanders the coast, Paul assembles in detail the fragments of a life that seemed to have ended with Euan’s. In this beautifully modulated, heart-rending novel, Andrew Cowan fathoms the relationship between a parent and child, as seen through the eyes of a man struggling to come to terms with his life and losses as both father and son. All the more powerful for its delicacy and restraint, this is a novel that resonates in the mind long after the last page.

Picador

It’s December and there is one foot of snow. The narrator, Paul, is driving east to the seaside in the imaginary company of his son, Euan, whose sixth birthday this would have been. As he drives, and later as he wanders the coast, Paul assembles in detail the fragments of a life that seemed to have ended with Euan’s. Reflecting on the themes that preoccupy him—love and longing and loss; the burial of the past and the unearthing of memory—Paul’s story is a labor, and a letter, of love, addressed from father to son, which insists on renewal, the spring, and all that’s to follow.

It is December 22nd, a foot of snow has fallen, and Paul is heading out for a small coastal resort on his son Euan's sixth birthday. Shall I tell you a story? he says and recalls the boy's birth, his first words and steps, all the stuff of forgetting, of any boy's life...But nothing, Paul has decided, should ever be lost or discarded or buried, as it was in his own childhood. And so he confides the history of his relationship with Ruth, Euan's mother; the death of his own mother when he himself was a boy; and his father's refusal ever to explain what occurred. It soon becomes evident, however, that Euan is not in the car. Evident, too, that Paul is living alone, and that in the cliffs and dunes of the seaside resort lies the key to his story's conclusion.

Sceptre

On the morning of his fortieth birthday, Mike Hannah wakes from a dream about the girl he loved twenty years earlier. Once an aspiring writer, he is now a private detective whose work and marriage have become routine, and he begins to wonder what might have been. Which leads him to wondering where his ex-girlfriend is now, and whether other people's lives are more exciting than his. Which leads him to spying on his own family, friends and neighbours. Which leads to some very unwelcome surprises...

What I Know

Why finish last?

Queen Anne P

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Cowan, Andrew. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Cowan, Andrew

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Cowan, Andrew. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Pig (Penguin Fiction)

Common Ground

Common Ground

Pig (Harvest Book)

Crustaceans

Crustaceans

Crustaceans

What I Know

What I Know

Why finish last?