num_pages: 374
description: One Sunday morning in Glasgow, Sammy, an ex-convict and sometime shoplifter, awakens down a lane after a two-day drinking binge. Friday is a blur and Saturday has disappeared altogether from his memory. Unwisely he gets into a physical altercation with some soldiers; when he next revives he’s in a jail cell, badly battered and—he slowly discovers—completely blind. And things don’t get any better: His girlfriend has disappeared. The police are questioning him and playing every kind of cop game with his head. His stab at Disability Compensation catches him in the Kafkaesque coils of the welfare bureaucracy. Sammy’s response to this wave of misfortune? “So okay, ye’vd had this bad time. Ye’ve lost yer sight for a few days and it’s been bad. Ye’ve coped but ye’ve fucking coped.” Told in the utterly uncensored language of the Scottish lower classes, How Late It Was, How Late is a dark and subtly political parable of struggle and survival, a masterpiece of irony and black humor.
language: English
title: How Late It Was, How Late
titlecomplete: How Late It Was, How Late
genres: Classics, Fiction, 20th Century, Literature, Scotland, Crime, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Novels, British Literature
ratings_count: 4289
places: Glasgow, Scotland
awards: awardedAt: 757411200000
name: Booker Prize
publisher: W. W. Norton