The Ossians

Douglas Johnstone

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Meet Connor, the lead singer of The Ossians. He’s twenty-four, thinks he knows it all, and is gloriously living the rock star lifestyle before his band really merits it. The band are off on a two-week tour of the north of Scotland, to have a ‘real life’ experience, and find out something about their own country, in the middle of winter. Now there’s an idea only Connor could come up with. His band-mates, who often feel like his minders, are his twin sister Kate, his girlfriend Hannah, and his best friend Danny.

When Connor’s dealer Nick catches up with him in the gents of an Edinburgh club after an Ossians gig, and makes Connor agree, at knife point and after a beating, to meet various people on the course of the tour and exchange packages with them, the rock ‘n’ roll dream takes on a nightmarish quality. Fuelled by gin, speed, prescription drugs (stolen from hospital patients, taken at random from the muddle of his pocket) and lack of food or sleep, Connor’s paranoia begins to get the better of him. Who is the androgynous figure he keeps seeing on the local news on TV? Are the police onto him? Is he being stalked?

Reviews

The Scottish Review of Books review
"A major Scottish novel" Ian Rankin
"A rock odyssey so exhilaratingly authentic, you can hear the chords and smell the vomit" Christopher Brookmyre
"A gripping, compelling roadtrip in the company of a drug-ravaged, arrogant, untamed visionary" Niall Griffiths
"This is the This is Spinal Tap for Scotland's lost generation. Johnstone has taken a small story of a small band lost in a small country and created an epic" Ewan Morrison