60 Days in the Year of a Life

On his sixtieth birthday, Raymond intends to take the day off.

He has taken Bastille Day off for years: one day kept free of meetings, office cake and the belief that every day must prove its worth. But sixty is a number that asks questions, so he goes back through the birthdays that brought him here. One chapter for every fourteenth of July, from the day he was born in West Lothian in 1967 to the day before he turns sixty.

A new town built to a plan. A collie who worked out the route to school. A library walk, a cupboard off the maths corridor and an Apple II. Napier, Edinburgh, a Tuesday quiz in Leith, a tide table on a nail in a cottage at Cruden Bay, and a working life spent making sure that lists of people are right: the policyholders of an old Edinburgh life office, the men on the North Sea platforms, the patients in the beds of a north east hospital.

It is a life of systems that hold still and people who do not always know how to meet him inside them, and of the few who did. Autism is not set apart here as a lesson to be explained. It is lived, one birthday at a time.

Dry, funny and unsentimental, 60 Days in the Year of a Life is a Scottish novel about memory, work, family, the things we keep, and the long business of finding out who you have been all along.