Only Here, Only Now

Tom Newlands sets his debut in 1990s Fife, where fourteen-year-old Cora Mowat is growing up undiagnosed and unaccommodated — her school's response to what would now be recognized as ADHD is a vague recommendation she be "checked for anxiety, and for being hyper." That gap between the era's clinical language and Cora's actual experience is the book's real subject: a girl trying to explain a mind that keeps outrunning her, in a place with no vocabulary for it. When her mother's new boyfriend, a shaven-headed small-time criminal, moves into their house, the tension escalates toward a tragedy that scatters the story across three towns and years. Reviewers have noted the novel sags briefly in its middle stretch, but its voice — funny, furious, unsentimental about poverty — carries it through to a genuinely earned final third.