Lucian Robinson

Taxi, Please

A Decent Ride

By

Jonathan Cape 482pp £12.99 order from our bookshop

Hurricanes are in vogue in recent fiction; Richard Ford’s Let Me Be Frank with You and Ben Lerner’s 10:04 both used Hurricane Sandy to structure their narratives. In Irvine Welsh’s tenth novel, A Decent Ride, Hurricane Bawbag, which passed through Scotland in December 2011, does similar work as a temporal reference and as an exemplar of the Scottish ability to greet adversity with a stoicism born of familiarity. 

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'Although he travels through time and space to find the best produce, his choices, delightfully, are not obvious.'… ,
    • RT : I regularly make purchases based on - it’s excellent.,
    • RT : I wrote about Yoko Ogawa's dreamlike, allegorical novel The Memory Police, newly published in English in a translat… ,
    • 'At this frankly apocalyptic moment for indigenous rights in Brazil, John Hemming’s "People of the Rainforest" is a… ,
    • 'I was dumbfounded by the view of the Berlin Wall from the eastern side. It seemed inconceivable that in under thre… ,
    • RT : Danger for ‘local’ staff, access in exchange for silence (and logos) - all sounds familiar in this fascinating look… ,
    • 'He has long been eclipsed by Vermeer, though his interiors are arguably more ambitious.' David Gelber on the Dutc… ,
    Follow Us