Toy Fights: A Boyhood - 'A classic of its kind' William Boyd

Description

Don Paterson was born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1963 and spent his boyhoodliving on a working-class council housing estate. Toy Fights is the remarkablestory of his first twenty years. This is not just a book about music and family, but also about 'schizophrenia,hell, money, narcissists, debt and the working class, anger, swearing, drugs,books, football, love, origami, the peculiar insanity of Dundee, sugar, religiousmania, the sexual excesses of the Scottish club band scene and, moregenerally, the lengths we go to not to be bored. A truly remarkable feat of storytelling - as funny as it is dark - this is a memoirthat sits alongside Lorna Sage's Bad Blood, Clive James' Unreliable Memoirs,Deborah Orr's Motherwell and Douglas Stuart's Shuggie Bain.

Don Paterson was born in Dundee in 1963. His poetry collectionsinclude Nil Nil, God's Gift to Women, LandingLight, Rain, 40 Sonnets and Zonal. He is the author of threebooks of aphorism - The Book of Shadows, The Blind Eyeand The Fall at Home - as well as translations of AntonioMachado and Rainer Maria Rilke. He is also the author ofReading Shakespeare's Sonnets, Smith: A Reader's Guide tothe Poetry of Michael Donaghy, and The Poem: Lyric, Sign,Metre. His poetry has won many awards, including theWhitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize,the Costa Poetry Award, all three Forward Prizes, and the T.S. Eliot