Seventeen-year-old Stevie arrives back in Glasgow and gets a job with a Polish building crew not far from where his family lives, but can't bring himself to visit them.
To see why, we go back to the early 1990s, when Stevie's parents, Graham and Lindsey, were no older than he is now and Graham gets Lindsey pregnant while in Ireland with his Orange band. Although Drumchapel is a welcome change for Lindsey at first, she comes to find it suffocating and befriends Graham's brother, Eric, ostracised for marrying a Catholic. Seiffert lived in Glasgow for eight years, and she's drawn on that experience for The Walk Home, a rare novel in that it gives a literary voice to the culture of Orange lodges and working-class Protestantism. Writing in unadorned, very readable prose, she compares the issues facing the Drumchapel family with those of the Polish builder Jozef, keeping the strands largely separate but subtly hinting at the parallels between them.
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