Books by Robert Douglas

The special town called Saginaw remade itself many times as it grew from hunting ground and trading post into a lumbering, agriculture and manufacturing center. This book is about a Saginaw family and a neighborhood as we lived through the depression, two big wars and the postwar periods. For most of that time money and "things" were scarce, but we had each other and so we managed to have great fun. Despite differences in ethnicity and backgrounds we were very patriotic - not just about our country, but about our schools, town and state. It was a time that will probably never come back: When few people felt the need to lock their doors and there was virtually no violent crime. This book is about that time.

The third novel in Robert Douglas' much-loved Glaswegian trilogy will delight readers with its blend of humour, tragedy, and vivid sense of place.

The second novel from the ever popular authour of Night Song of the Last Tram and Whose Turn for the Stairs?

A tale of family, community and strength of spirit

We left Robert a long way from home, a sixteen-year-old recruit in the RAF. Now, we follow his escape from the Forces (until National Service a few years later!), his return to Glasgow and life down the pit. Once more, Robert's fantastic memory for people, places and anecdotes, combined with an ear for individual voices and the brilliant ability to evoke a bygone sense of community, will enchant his readers and sometimes appal them with the brutality of conditions he experienced.

In the final instalment in his autobiographical trilogy, Robert Douglas takes us through the sixties and into the eighties with his memories of life as a prison officer, and, at the end of his career, as an electricity chargehand driving around the Yorkshire Dales. He tells us of his prison experiences, with anecdotes about many of the most famous criminals in British history -- the Krays, the Richardsons, the Great Train Robbers, Soviet spies and many more. Told in the same endearing and fascinating voice that readers of LAST SONG OF THE NIGHT TRAM and SOMEWHERE TO LAY MY HEAD first fell in love with, this volume continues the story of Robert's remarkable journey of self-education, introducing us to larger-than-life characters on both sides of the bars, and evoking a strong sense of social change as Britain emerged from the post-War gloom into the bright lights of the Beatles years.

This is a wonderfully colourful and deeply poignant memoir of growing up in a 'single end' - one room in a Glasgow tenement - during and immediately after the Second World War. Although young Robert Douglas's life was blighted by the cruel if sporadic presence of his father, it was equally blessed by the love of his mother, Janet. While the story of their life together is in some ways very sad, it is also filled with humorous and happy memories. "e;Night Song of The Last Tram"e; is a superb evocation of childhood and of a Glasgow of trams and tenements that has long since disappeared.