How Late It Was, How Late

Sammy Samuels, an unemployed ex-convict in Glasgow, wakes up in a police cell after a lost drunken weekend and discovers he has gone blind. The novel stays entirely inside his head as he stumbles home, argues with the benefits system, dodges the police, and tries to hold onto his sense of himself against a bureaucracy that treats him as a problem to be processed. Kelman writes the whole book in unbroken Glaswegian speech, with no quotation marks and no concessions to a reader outside that world, turning Sammy's running monologue into a portrait of working-class life seen from the very bottom.