Books by Andrew O'Hagan

Everyone has a Tully Dawson: the friend who defines your life. In the summer of 1986, in a small Scottish town, James and Tully ignite a brilliantfriendship based on music, films and the rebel spirit. Tully has news. Mayflies is a memorial to youth's euphorias and to everyday tragedy.

How much do we keep from the people we love? Why is the truth so often buried in secrets? Can we learn from the past or must we forget it? Standing one evening at the window of her house by the sea, Anne Quirk sees a rabbit disappearing in the snow. Nobody remembers her now, but this elderly woman was in her youth a pioneer of British documentary photography. Her beloved grandson, Luke, now a captain with the Royal Western Fusiliers, is on a tour of duty in Afghanistan, part of a convoy taking equipment to the electricity plant at Kajaki. Only when Luke returns home to Scotland does Anne's secret story begin to emerge, along with his, and they set out for an old guest house in Blackpool where she once kept a room.

As he grew up, Andrew O'Hagan witnessed the decline of Britain and the rise of America, the end of British industry and the rise of Blair and the tabloids. This collection of essays tells the story of that period in our cultural and political life. Through the reported essays that first made O'Hagan's name, it's a book filled both with personal story and the power of documentary witness. Opening with a major personal piece examining the journey of Britain and America since the closing of the Thatcher years, it concludes with a piece of reportage telling the story of a British and an American soldier who died in Iraq on the same day in 2006. A fascinating, important and timely collection from a hugely important essayist.

Clears a devastating path from the bygone Glasgow of the 1970s to the grim secrets of Gloucester in the mid 1990s.

Maria Tambini is a 13-year-old girl with an amazing singing voice. Growing up above her mother's chip shop on the Scottish island of Bute, living at the centre of her family's dream of fame, Maria is an extraordinary girl making ready to escape the ordinary life.We first meet her amidst the faded grandeur of the seaside resort of Rothesay, with the Argyll hills and the Eighties in front of her, and behind her a long shadow: the secret story of her Italian-immigrant family. When Maria wins a national TV talent show she is taken to London and becomes an instant star of what used to be called light entertainment; she sings with Dean Martin and tours America, can fill the London Palladium, yet all the while 'the girl with the giant voice' is losing herself in fame and begins a private war against her own body. Maria becomes a living exhibit in the modern drama of celebrity: is it possible that she can be saved by love? Or is she to be consumed by an obsessive culture, by family lies and her number one fan?The cast of characters is so vivid and complex that they seem to encompass within their enthralling stories a portrait of a whole society, its history and its spirit.

Hugh Provan was a Modernist hero. A dreamer, a Socialist, a man of the people, he led Scotland's towerblock programme after the war. Now he lies on a bed on the eighteenth floor. The times have changed. His flats are coming down. The idealism he learned from his mother is gone. And even as his breath goes out he clings to the old ways. His wife sings her Scots ballads to soothe him, yet his final months are plagued by memory and loss, by a bitter sense of his family and his country, who could not live up to the houses he built for them. Meanwhile the corruption hearings bring their hammer down on the past.Hugh's grandson, Jamie, comes home to watch over his dying mentor. The old man's final months bring Jamie to see what is best and worst in the past that haunts them all, and he sees the fears of his own life unravel in the land that bred him. He tells the story of his own family - a tale of pride and delusion, of nationality and strong drink, of Catholic faith and the end of the old Left. It is a tale of dark hearts and modern houses, of three men in search of Utopia. Andrew O'Hagan has written a story which is a poignant and powerful reclamation of the past and a clear sighted gaze at our relationship with history, personal and public.

In 2001 a group of authors including Andrew O'Hagan, Tony Hawks and Irvine Welsh were given the opportunity to visit Sudan, one of the world's most inaccessible countries. The resulting book: The Weekenders - Travels in the Heart of Africa was an award-winning triumph, combining fiction and non-fiction into a compelling travel narrative that was both entertaining and illuminating. Now the Weekenders are back, joined by some new faces and taking on one of the world's most fascinating and contradictory cities - Calcutta. It is a trip like nothing you've ever seen or heard of before.