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Gordon M. Williams was born in Paisley in 1934. After he completed national service with the Royal Air Force in Germany, Willams began his career as a reporter for the Johnstone Advertiser, before moving to England and becoming an author in the mid-1960s. His novels include Walk Don't Walk, Big Morning Blues, The Camp, The Upper Pleasure Garden and From Scenes Like These, which was shortlisted for the inaugural Booker Prize in 1969. His novel The Siege of Trencher's Farm was adapted into the film Straw Dogs, directed by Sam Peckinpah. Working at the arts magazine Scene, Williams shared an office with the playwright Tom Stoppard. With Terry Venables, he wrote the beloved football novel They Used to Play on Grass, and later, while working as a commercial manager for Chelsea FC, the Hazell detective series, which was adapted for television in 1978. He died in 2017.
An elegy to ordinary lives. A forgotten classic entirely deserving of a place in the canon of great social realism novels of the twentieth century. A raw, unsparing tale of coming of age, of masculinity in crisis, of farm workers holding on as post-war Britain encroaches upon them. Full of the energy and nihilism of the ‘Angry Young Man’ movement, it lays bare the male psyche, the dark side of desire, and the ways in which men and women use each other to survive. A masterpiece of time and place that looks you square in the eye and demands to be read -- Douglas Stuart, Booker Prize winning author of <i>Shuggie Bain</i> A devastating study of 1950s Scottish adolescence by one of the most consummate stylists of the whole post-war era. From Scenes Like These is a genuine lost classic just waiting to be rediscovered by a new generation of readers -- DJ Taylor, author of <i>Orwell: The New Life</i> 'What impresses most is its harsh authenticity . . . Williams gets across the pains and perplexities of adolescent desire, guilt and aspiration convincingly and without literary frills' * New Statesman * 'Raw and vigorous, harsh and authentic' * Sunday Times * 'A remarkable talent' * Times Literary Supplement * 'A rare, raw, meaty novel' * Sunday Telegraph * 'A deep insight into the springs of violence' * The Guardian *
