How the Scottish care system failed me in every conceivable way

This is one of those books that may change you when you read it, so be warned –although Jenni Fagan herself warns you in the first lines: ‘Twenty years ago I began writing this memoir as a suicide note.’

Ootlin is about how the care system in Scotland failed the author in every conceivable way. Fagan is only in her forties, so this is not terribly long ago. She has dug up every file, every archive on herself as a baby in care – there are thousands of pages, ‘most redacted in black lest they validate something that would allow me to sue to the social work department’. ‘I’ve never met an abuser who owned what they did, or a system that wanted to be accountable,’ she says, and then asks us to bear witness, which we must.

Of course there are a great many books about growing up in terrible circumstances: Douglas Stuart’s novel Shuggie Bain, recently, and Kerry Hudson’s sensational memoir Lowborn; there’s a lot, in the period and the setting, reminiscent of Train-spotting too.