Little Miss Sunshine

James Kelman is famously not a man fond of making concessions — whether to bourgeois interviewers, literary fashions, traditional punctuation or his own readers. Sure enough, his latest novel comes in familiar form: a continuous, chapterless slab of interior monologue from a working-class Glaswegian struggling against the un-remitting toughness of what a character in his last book of short stories called the ‘greatbritishsocialsystem’. True, the protagonist here does represent one departure from the norm, by being a woman — thereby allowing Kelman to add another layer of oppression to the usual mix. Even so, the only thing remotely quirky about Mo said she was quirky is the title.

The plot (as ever with Kelman, a word to use loosely) concerns 24 unspectacular hours in the life of Helen, who’s left Glasgow to escape her unnamed but apparently horrible ex-husband. Now, she’s holed up in a tiny south London flat with a Muslim boyfriend Mo and her six-year-old daughter Sophie, who for reasons of space sleeps in a cupboard.