Mention Scotland, and people tend to think of beautiful heather-clad mountains, bagpipes, kilts, fine malt whisky, haggis, and the Loch Ness monster. Such touristic stereotypes are far removed from the Scotland portrayed in Only Here, Only Now (HarperVia, 2024). Tom Newlands’s novel is largely set in two housing developments in Fife, Muircross and Abbotscraig. These are imaginary places, but they’ve so many echoes of real towns in the area—Leven, Methil, Buckhaven—that the settings are potently authentic. The final part of the book is set in Glasgow.

Just as Edinburgh had its squalid side exposed in Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, and Glasgow got a comparably downbeat treatment in Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain, so Fife has now received a similarly arresting portrait of its less picturesque aspects in this electrifying novel. Tourist Fife focuses on the pretty fishing villages of the coastal area known as the East Neuk—Crail, Pittenweem, Anstruther—and on St Andrews, home of golf and Scotland’s oldest university. Though set just a few miles from these attractive places, Only Here, Only Now shows us another world, one in which poverty, violence, and alcohol and drug abuse are recurring features.

We see this world through the eyes of Cora Mowatt, Newlands’s brilliantly realized young protagonist. Cora’s perspective is framed by the fact that she’s neurodivergent, growing up with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder at a time when this condition was only starting to be recognized. As Cora puts it, she suffers from “some weird thing that no one believes.” Her teachers label her as “lazy and overemotional,” “distracted,” “in her own world of wasted potential.” They complain she “talks too much” and “won’t sit still long enough” to write things down. “They think I’m doing it on purpose,” Cora says, but “I’m not. I try to hide it but it’s who I am.”

At the end of the book, Newlands—himself neurodivergent—adds a note that provides some stark background to Cora’s plight: “In 1990, there were 40 children in the UK receiving medical treatment for the condition known today as ADHD. By the end of that decade, the number had risen to 3 in every 1,000 children.” What he calls “persistent scepticism” about the condition meant it wasn’t officially recognized until 2000. Only Here, Only Now is set between 1994 and 1998.

This is a coming-of-age story that gives readers the unvarnished, wholly convincing outlook of a girl trying to find her way in anything but ideal conditions.

Cora is fourteen when we meet her. The book follows her until she’s living independently, if precariously, as an eighteen-year-old in Glasgow. This coming-of-age story gives readers the unvarnished, wholly convincing outlook of a girl trying to find her way in anything but ideal conditions. Poverty and her ADHD set the ground rules, with unemployment (or low-paid work), poor diet, various addictions, and frequent violence characterizing the postmining desolation of the working-class parts of Fife she grows up in.

Newlands writes with uncommon verve and energy. The peppering of Cora’s language with an array of commonly used Scots words adds to the sense of gutsy realism the book emanates. In parts laugh-out-loud funny, in parts heartbreakingly sad, the narrative sweeps us along at a pace that perfectly fits Cora’s restlessness. She describes herself as feeling as if she’s occupied by “a wee rebel in my body” who needs “the sluggishness of the world to speed up until it matched what was happening inside her.”

At times laugh-out-loud funny, while at other times heartbreakingly sad, the narrative sweeps us along at a pace that perfectly fits Cora’s restlessness.

Cora has a captivating, if often crude, way with words. She describes one of her mother’s men as looking “like someone that would lock you in the coal bin and force you to eat paint.” Muircross is “a manky [disgusting/filthy] wee hellhole sat out by itself on a lump of coast the shape of a chicken nugget.” School is dismissed as largely irrelevant. It “taught you the pH scale and Frère Jacques on the glockenspiel and dates of the Beer Hall Putsch,” but it “never mentioned pals or weans [babies] or loneliness.” Adults get similarly short shrift. All they ever did, in Cora’s estimation, “was tell you bad news or lies or make you eat things at a certain speed.”

Whether it’s some aspect of her relationship with her wheelchair-bound mother, or with Gunner, her mother’s one-eyed, live-in companion, or how she relates with friends, teachers, or employers, the book is filled with a whole catalog of quirky, revealing, and often shocking cameos: dissecting a rat in biology, attending a party where she fends off a sexual assault, the suicide of a classmate, and a school dance, to mention just a few. Cumulatively, these cameos give a striking portrayal of Cora’s unique life-world.

Only Here, Only Now would be an impressive achievement for a novelist at any stage of their career, but as a first book, it’s particularly noteworthy.

One of the functions of literature, surely, is to let us see through other people’s eyes. The vision Newlands has created here, despite its frequent ugliness, is utterly beguiling. Only Here, Only Now would be an impressive achievement for a novelist at any stage of their career. As a first book, it’s particularly noteworthy and provides ample reason to eagerly anticipate his new book, Something Like Happiness.

St. Andrews, Scotland