The Voids
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A BOOK TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2022 FOR BBC, i-D MAGAZINE, AND FOYLES
‘After a couple of weeks, I found myself standing outside the voids in the middle of the night listening for human activity, for any sign of life at all. Voids are flats that have been vacated, that will never be lived in again. But there never were any signs of life. Only the wind whistling through vacant interiors.’
In a condemned tower block in Glasgow, residents slowly trickle away until a young man is left alone with only the angels and devils in his mind for company. Stumbling from one surreal situation to the next, he encounters others on the margins of society, finding friendship and camaraderie wherever it is offered, grappling with who he is and what shape his future might take.
The Voids is an unsparing story of modern-day Britain, told with brilliant flashes of humour and humanity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Scottish author O'Connor delivers a searing and passionate debut from the voice of an angsty young Glaswegian who squats in a mostly abandoned high rise he calls "the voids." The unnamed narrator is dejected after a breakup and newly unemployed, and fills his depressed days by aimlessly wandering the city's underbelly. He goes to bars, trips on LSD, meets girls, and commiserates with the broken and downtrodden. As his life devolves into chaos, one highlight is when he steals a bag of cocaine from a gangster on a rainy night that ends in disappointment and desperation. Despite the despair and depravity that suffuses the narrator's Glasgow, he exudes a fierce, glowing vitality, describing snowmelt from rooftops as "the tears of a city" and a mountain range he once saw in Italy as "lifted straight out of the mind of God." Through his suffering and the madness of his lifestyle, he accumulates a treasure-trove of dazzling, almost saintly insights into human nature, noting, for instance, that regret imbues people with "the loneliness of an empty church." Readers will be lifted by his protagonist's commitment to finding beauty in the darkness.
