Patrick Doyle is a 29-year-old teacher in an ordinary school. Disaffected, frustrated and increasingly bitter at the system he is employed to maintain, Patrick begins his rebellion, fuelled by drink and his passionate, unrequited love for a fellow teacher. A Disaffection is the apparently straightforward story of one week in a man's life in which he decides to change the way he lives. Under the surface, however, lies a brilliant and complex examination of class, human culture and character written with irony, tenderness, enormous anger and, above all, the honesty that has marked James Kelman...

WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE'A passionate, scintillating, brilliant song of a book'GuardianSammy's had a bad week. Most of it's just a blank space in his mind, and the bits that he can remember, he'd rather not.