I get sent a lot of blurbs about books being published and available for review. Mostly they don’t interest me, and I scroll right on past. Occasionally they sound decent and I request a copy, and very occasionally they’re actually good. Very very rarely, they’re set in the town where I live and I enjoy them very much. So it was with The Milk Boys. 

The book starts with Tommy Loy, who moves to East Kilbride with his family in 1959, just as it is becoming established as one of Scotland’s New Towns. Unusually perhaps, he’s deid by the end of the first chapter.

As the rest of the book goes on without him, we meet a variety of characters from the town in the late 70s, starting with Tommy’s son Billy who is getting up in the dead of night to start his first shift on a milk run. Then there are others from the milk floats, people from the schools, those working around EK, and some nasty guys from the nearest town. Where, incidentally, I used to live. Truly, this book was eye-opening. 

It’s fiction, though, and I’ll keep telling myself that while I send my son out to school every day. There’s a constant undercurrent (and frequent outburst) of threat and violence, from people (men) who are railing against a life that hasn’t delivered what they expected, and taking it out on those around them. 

Growing up in north-west Glasgow, the idea of territorial gangs isn’t entirely unfamiliar to me, though it was never my day-to-day reality. The Milk Boys paints a picture of a town carved up and delineated, where rivalries and grudges last well beyond the lifespan of those that initiated them. But amongst the violence, the drugs, the territorial fights and the sectarianism (because of course), there’s also a town full of people just trying to get on with things, dealing with the hand that life’s dealt them. 

This book initially appealed to me because of the local angle, but anyone that has ever lived in a town of any size will recognise so much of what’s in here. The organisers, the peace-makers, the wannabe hard-men, the shit-stirrers, the people who are always first to the pub and last to pay. 

I enjoyed Billy’s coming-of-age arc, and his gradual discoveries of the reality of who his dad was. As he comes to terms with the ripple effect of the ways his dad lived and died, he himself is making decisions about who he is and how he wants to live. Even more so, though, I enjoyed the way the book built a picture of the web of human relationships and interactions that make where we live more than just a collection of houses. 

The Milk Boys is pretty brutal and there’s a whole load of content notes I can provide if anyone wants to ask. If you’re looking for a feel-good read this probably isn’t the one for you, but if it’s black humour and gritty tales you want then this book has you covered. 

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