Comrades and Vexations

'It's a miscellany, a smörgåsbord, says the author - a gathering of memories and preoccupations charting an eventful lifetime spent in Scotland, South Africa, The United States and New Zealand. From wartime boyhood in Glasgow to Berlin in 1955, Marshall Walker then takes us with him into an encounter with racism in 1970 Memphis, Tennessee and to his first surprising night in New York. We accompany an 11-year-old girl aboard a clipper ship on a voyage from London to Brisbane in 1895, and join the movement against apartheid. There are problems with acute myopia, cancer and the evasiveness of God. There's Walker's sense of the importance of Burns and his love of the Scottish island of Lismore. And testimony to pleasures afforded by the writings of Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, William Faulkner, Beatrix Potter, John Buchan, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Raymond Chandler, Edwin Morgan, Norman MacCaig, Robert Penn Warren, Saul Bellow, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Beckett as well as a selection of American humourists. The reader is invited to graze and sample - above all to enjoy.