Glasgow Boys

Margaret McDonald 

Faber & Faber, £8.99 

Coming of age stories may be ten a penny, but the specific challenges facing children raised in care as they enter the adult world are not so frequently tackled, and Margaret McDonald’s debut novel treats the subject with boundless sensitivity and compassion.

Glasgow Boys follows two teenagers, Finlay and Banjo, who have spent a large part of their lives in care. As roommates in a hostel in St Andrews, they had forged a special bond, providing, in their unspoken way, mutual comfort and support. In the care system since he was ten, Banjo had developed a dependence on painkillers. The empathic Finlay helped him get through withdrawal.

Three years later, the boys have lost touch with each other and are keenly aware of the adult lives that lie before them. Banjo, short for his age and fiery tempered, is in his final year of school in East Kilbride, living with a foster couple, Paula and Henry, who are patient and kind with him, though Banjo finds it hard to reciprocate. He must be tough to survive, he believes, and is reluctant to let down his emotional barriers. He’s a keen runner, which is how he works off his ever-present rage, but it’s only partially successful. At times, the red mist descends, and violent altercations with other pupils mean that he’s close to being expelled.

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At the same time, Finlay is arriving in Glasgow, “his whole life stuffed into a duffel and a backpack”, to begin a degree in nursing. He’s a second generation Polish immigrant, cut off from his heritage by losing his mother and never having known his father. Adjusting to his new situation is daunting, to say the least, from the weirdness of having a room of his own to the challenge of interacting with the effusive girls on his course who immediately want to make him their friend. Even more disconcerting is his reaction to a beautiful young man named Akash, to whom he is instantly attracted and with whom he shares a childhood history that has been all but wiped from his memory.

Although now separated for three years, after an unspecified incident that drove them apart, Banjo and Finlay have almost everything in common. Neither can trust the feeling of being loved, or can trust themselves to love anyone else. Both have been deprived of touch since their earliest years, craving it and shrinking away from it at the same time. Their social skills are underdeveloped, and they retreat into isolation when pushed out of their comfort zones. They’re also reluctant to tell anyone they’ve been in care, aware of the stigma it carries.

Although it’s obvious that Banjo and Finlay will be reunited by the end, McDonald keeps them apart, save for flashbacks to the St Andrews hostel where their friendship was forged and, somehow, destroyed. We see their separate struggles to support themselves through part-time jobs, and watch them risk romance for the first time, even though experience has taught them that they’ll surely lose anyone they care about.

It warms the heart to see them acquiring friends and building new families, but breaks it again to see how affected they are by the little details of happy domestic life, and their disbelief that they might be worthy of it themselves.

Pitched at the Young Adult market, Glasgow Boys swerves away from explicit content and radiates an optimism which could easily come across as a bit too cosy. But it’s a heartfelt, affecting novel about love and vulnerability, shame and stigma, loneliness, acceptance and overcoming fear.