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William McIlvanney is a highly respected Scottish writer, best known for his detective fiction. Here he explores a crumbling Ayrshire mining community and one man's fight to escape from it through the possibilities opened up through bare-knuckle fighting.

In a Victorian mansion hotel on a Scottish island, a group of English Literature lecturers and students from Glasgow gather for a study weekend, though studying is not exactly what some of them have in mind. And the weekend does prove to be a major turning point in the emotional lives of several people... just not quite in the way any of them expected. William McIlvanney's novel brilliantly illustrates how humans are driven by animal instincts, but have the mental capacity to analyse, harness and rue them. Which also means we continue to dream, even when our dreams fail us.