14-year-old Cora Mowat is growing up in 1990s Fife, on a council estate in post-industrial Scotland, and life is not easy. It’s just her, her mum who’s in a wheelchair, and her mum’s boyfriends who pass through over the years. Money is scarce, school is a challenge, friendships can be tricky, and things would definitely be better if she could just meet a nice boy. Add to this, Cora gets restless, she gets sudden unquenchable urges to move at the worst times, she’s impulsive, and finds it hard to stay focused. Then her mum’s new boyfriend arrives on the scene, moving in and disrupting things further.

Only Here, Only Now is a vibrant and poignant coming-of-age story, our narrator navigating an already difficult adolescence with undiagnosed ADHD. Despite the difficult themes explored – poverty, prejudice, complex families, addiction, grief, and the stark sense of not belonging during formative adolescent years – there’s a lot of warmth and even humour to this story, through Cora’s vivid descriptions and observations of the gritty world around her, and her different relationships with the wide cast of characters we meet along the way. These relationships are beautifully explored; the unexpected warmth and connection she discovers with some people, and the way she ultimately learns to step away from people who let her down.  

Newlands’ writing style, in dynamic Scottish vernacular, immerses us in Cora’s world and wonderfully captures her restless mind. We see her worries and vulnerability but also her tenacity and her sense of hope. Her struggles are not enough to quash her dreams of a better life, as she dreams of escape from the claustrophobia and limitations of small-town dynamics, and eyes up the lights of Glasgow as a place where she will finally come into her own and figure out her place in the world; but escape from the place we have always called home to the bright city lights isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be. A unique and compelling journey of self-discovery, a story of resilience and hope through hardship. I loved my time with Cora Mowat.

Only Here, Only Now has just been published by Phoenix Books. Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the DRC.

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Only Here, Only Now has just been published by Phoenix Books. Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the DRC.

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Tom Newlands is a Scottish writer living in London. He is a winner of the London Writer’s Award for Literary Fiction, a Creative Future Writer’s Award and New Writing North’s A Writing Chance. Most recently his work has appeared in the New Statesman, New Writing Scotland and in the BBC Radio production Margins to Mainstream, with actor Michael Sheen. Only Here, Only Now is his debut novel.