To the Dogs
Louise Welsh
Available as Hardback, eBook
A darkly comic, gritty novel from the award-winning writer of The Cutting Room, exploring organised crime, institutional corruption and moral compromise in Glasgow
A TIMES BEST NEW CRIME FICTION OF THE MONTH
Jim Brennan is flying high. Against all odds, he is a big man at the university, tipped for the head job and an office at the top of the ivory tower. He has a beautiful, accomplished wife and two healthy children. Jim drives an Audi, and his dog is a pedigree bichon frisé. Not bad for the son of a hardman who grew up in a room and kitchen.
But for every person who’s watched his progress and wanted to hitch a lift, there’s someone else desperate to drag him back down. When his son Elliot is arrested on drugs charges, Jim is approached by men he thought he had left safely in his past. Their demands threaten his family, students and reputation.
As the pressure mounts, Jim discovers he is more like his father than he thought. The question is, how far will Professor Jim Brennan go to save the life he built?
“Welsh gleefully puts her priggish protagonist through the mill in this alternative campus novel … Every character, even Benji the bichon frisé, is sharply and succinctly defined. To the Dogs, dripping in irony, is a gripping amorality tale”
the Times
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“A propulsive thriller, the narrative pace rattling along at a rate of knots, combined with Welsh’s seductive and perceptive prose … To the Dogs confirms Welsh’s position in the very top tier of Scottish novelists, whatever the genre”
Doug Johnstone
big Issue
”To the Dogs sees Welsh in assertive form, her subject contemporary academia in thrall to wealthy students from overseas … Welsh exhibits her usual unassailable command of a gritty Glaswegian setting and a fatalistic perception of how quickly ordered lives can spin into chaos”
financial Times
”To the Dogs is easily the best of Welsh’s recent crime novels. I simply could not put it down”
Alex Gray
“[Welsh] explores Glaswegian masculinity and whether we can change who we are in this sharp, pungent story”
herald
Louise Welsh
Louise Welsh is an award-winning author of ten novels. The Cutting Room, her debut novel, won the Crime Writers’ Association John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger Award and the Saltire First Book of The Year Award. In 2018, she was named the Most Inspiring Saltire First Book Award winner by public vote. She is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. In 2022 she published The Second Cut, which was shortlisted for the Bloody Scotland McIlvanney Prize for Crime Book of the Year and named by The Times as their Crime Book of the Year.
@louisewelsh00