CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Maria Fyfe: A working-class hero is something to be
ANGUS REID recommends the brilliant memoir of a Labour activist and politician who never lost sight of her roots
INDEFATIGABLE: Maria Fyfe (far right) in front of Mary Barbour memorial
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
Singing in the Streets
by Maria Fyfe
(Luath Press, £14.99)
IN TELLING the story of her life, from her birth in 1938 in the Gorbals up to the moment she entered Parliament in 1987, Maria Fyfe proves herself to be a writer of rare brilliance.
Her Glasgow memoir Singing in the Streets is fast-paced and dramatic, moving and extremely funny. Head and shoulders above others in the field of political autobiography, she has a poet’s eye for detail and deft picture-painting and a writer’s genius for telling an extraordinary story.
It’s a story of a working-class woman’s self-emancipation and commitment to the emancipation of others. And it’s a love story that is never sentimental but that makes you weep.
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