Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Jul 2017
352 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Dirt Road is a powerful story about the strength of family ties, the consolation of music, and one unforgettable journey from darkness to light.
After his mother's recent death, sixteen-year-old Murdo and his father travel from their home in rural Scotland to Alabama to be with his émigré uncle and American aunt. Stopping at a small town on their way from the airport, Murdo happens upon a family playing zydeco music and joins them, leaving with a gift of two CDs of Southern American songs. On this first visit to the States, Murdo notices racial tension, religious fundamentalism, the threat of severe weather, guns, and aggressive behavior, all unfamiliar to him. Yet his connection to the place strengthens by way of its musical culture. Murdo may be young but he is already a musician.
While at their relatives' home, the grieving father and son experience kindness and kinship but share few words of comfort with each other, Murdo losing himself in music and his reticent and protective dad in books. The aunt, "the very very best," Murdo calls her, provides whatever solace he receives, until his father comes around in a scene of great emotional release.
As James Wood has written of this brilliant writer's previous work in The New Yorker, "The pleasure, as always in Kelman, is being allowed to inhabit mental meandering and half-finished thoughts, digressions and wayward jokes, so that we are present" with his characters.
"Starred Review. Like in his previous works, Kelman has created a fully-realized, relatable voice that reveals a young man's urgent need for connection in a time of grief." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. A rich tale of family, dislocation, the joys of creativity, and the torment of painful choices." - Kirkus
"Kelman gives us visceral vernacular, Joycean stream of consciousness, wry humor, old resentments and painful memories, all in counterpoint to the music on and off stage. And there's love. A celebration of what it is to be human." - The Spectator (UK)
"Kelman is one of the most influential writers of his generation ... He conveys with great poignancy the intractable silences and clumsy negotiations of intimacy between Murdo and his father Tom, both wounded by grief and loss." - The Guardian (UK)
"A beautifully-coloured account of loss and love... One of Kelman's gifts as a writer is his ability to describe the world as perceived by his protagonist without resorting to a first-person narrative. Like a camera on Murdo's shoulder, we see the world as the boy sees it, sensing the miracle of his emergence as a confident young man." - The Times (UK)
"Poignant and beautiful. ...This brilliant understated novel ends as it began, with Tom again trying to get Murdo out the door: 'Half six son ye better get up.'" - Independent (UK)
"Quietly, subtly Kelman peels back the veil of daily life to reveal the urgent struggle of a sixteen-year-old coming to terms with death. This is a brilliant book, and like all great works of art, it is universal - whether you're reading it in Scotland, Hampstead, or Alabama." - The Times Literary Supplement (UK)
"Dirt Road is a life-affirming novel, in which Kelman paints a convincing and at times moving portrait of two likable characters on the road to fulfillment and recovery." - The Observer (UK)
"The seeming lightness of the novel's slim plot is freighted with meaning. ... The hopeful spirit in which Kelman allows Murdo to traverse both his grief and his adventure on the road makes for an engrossing and moving coming-of-age tale." - Financial Times
"The bond between a father and son is at the heart of James Kelman's novel, the beautiful and musical Dirt Road... It is filled with more light and less dark humor than Kelman's previous books." - The National (Scotland)
"The intensity of this novel, as with all of Kelman's, draws you like a magnet...There is anger here, about world politics, religion, gun culture, and the oppression of the poor, but Kelman, for the past three decades our most exciting novelist, trains his deepest insights and fury on a young man trying to understand death." - The Herald (Scotland)
"So you've no duty to read Kelman's new novel, but you'll be missing something very good if you don't, for Dirt Road may well be the best thing he has written. ... Absorbing and delightful ... listen to it and be enriched." - Allan Massie, The Scotsman (Scotland)
"This Man Booker-winning author is hugely influential for good reason: his writing is vibrant and alive, effortlessly overheard and keenly observed, in a way many novels aspire to be and few achieve." - The Sydney Morning Herald
"Dirt Road is brilliant, a deeply moving and exciting novel. I've always admired Kelman's work and this had me gripped. I felt I was standing beside Murdo right through the book, and he was great, big, loveable, irritating, wonderful company." - Roddy Doyle, author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
"Kelman in the American South, with a zydeco lilt, proves irresistible - a thrilling return from one of our most essential novelists." - Kevin Barry, author of Beatlebone
"In Dirt Road James Kelman brings alive a human consciousness like no other writer can." - Alan Warner, author of Morvern Callar
"In writing as pure as this, language becomes the very bones and meat of the characters. I am not transported by these sentences into Murdo's world; I am Murdo." - Ross Raisin, author of God's Own Country
This information about Dirt Road was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
James Kelman was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1989 with his novel, A Disaffection, which also won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. He went on to win the Booker Prize five years later with How Late it Was, How Late: Stories, before being shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2009 and 2011. He has taught at the University of Texas, Austin, and San José State University in California. Kelman was born in Glasgow, Scotland, where he currently lives.
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