That Was a Shiver, and Other Stories
James Kelman
“People would see me coming and know who I was, who I was not and so what if I had those blue eyes? Some blue eyes are different.”
Available as Paperback, eBook
Intimate new stories from the Booker Prize-winning James Kelman. He ‘brings alive a human consciousness like no other writer can’ ALAN WARNER
SHORTLISTED FOR SALTIRE FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR, 2017
LONGLISTED FOR THE EDGE HILL PRIZE, 2018
A local tries to sell his sister to a trucker as he passes through town; a couple put their children to bed and hear a loud scratching at the wall; a man looks into a mirror and reflects on becoming more like his father.
Sparky, touching and brilliantly daring, these stories uncover human feeling in the ordinary and the everyday, and are a reminder of Kelman’s exceptional talent.
“Kelman is on another level to most of the living writers in the UK”
guardian
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“Kelman has always been a true and honest writer; which is why he is one of the fairly few who really matter”
Allan Massie
scotsman
“Brilliant … this collection shows a writer who is still at the top of his game, brimming with creativity, vitality and artistic integrity”
irish Independent
“Like the best short story writers - James Joyce, Kafka, John Cheever, Alice Munro - he has reinvented the form”
the Herald
“Kelman brings alive a human consciousness like no other writer can”
Alan Warner
James Kelman
James Kelman was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1989 with A Disaffection, which also won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. He went on to win the Booker Prize five years later with How Late It Was, How Late, before being shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2009 and 2011. Both Dirt Road and That Was a Shiver were shortlisted for the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year in 2016 and 2017.
That Was a Shiver, and Other Stories
‘I’ll die at the desk. So what, where’s the coffee? Forty-five years after that first collection of stories here I go with another. Ye cannay beat that feeling man it’s beautiful. A new collection of stories! What a marvel.’ James Kelman on the writing life is a braw thing indeed.
Guardian