The Convalescent: 13 (Vagabonds) - Tapa blanda

William Templeton is awoken from his dead life as an alcoholic by the murder of his mother. He has no memory of when he last visited her, and no sense of what their relationship might have been. He feels the need to reacquaint himself with the world: he stops drinking and embarks upon the long convalescence that is the story of this book. It is the story of one man's struggle against alcoholism. It is witty and it is painful. It is a story of wasted lives, flawed relationships, and the horrors of old age, but through it all, humour and hope rebalance the drudge and misery.

Peter Gilmour was born in 1941 in Glasgow, where he still lives. He was sent at the age of eight to a boarding school and then, at thirteen, to a public school. Then there was a series of dull jobs, and at the first in the Yorkhill Dock, Glasgow, he strongly had the sense that he was or could be a writer, even though he had written absolutely nothing at the time. He then worked in a publisher's firm and then a bookshop. Eventually he went to Strathclyde University and Stirling University after which, furnished with two degrees, he got a job with the Open University as an associate lecturer. This sustained him and counted as a career until he retired with great relief in 2007. Happenstance Press has published his collection of poetry, Taking Account, and he is at work on another novel. At the age of 71 his future seems at once wondrously open and damningly shut.