Milltown

Milltown is a small community just outside Glasgow where everything in 1914 is local: the pub, the preacher, the policeman, the teacher; the gossip, the poacher, the pariah, the bleacher. Quiet, that is, unless you consider three inconvenient distractions – a Rumour, a Psychopath and a First World War.

When Aggie McMillan’s unfailing intuition senses that the suicide of a young man in the village has more sinister overtones, she sets in motion a train of events which will have fateful consequences for her and for those around her. Meanwhile the foundations, fixtures and fittings of this close knit community are about to be torn asunder by the Great War as all but one of its young men join up together to fight together and to die together at the battle of the Somme, leaving ‘naebody left tae kiss the lassies’.

Away from the great Fall-In, other tensions are brewing: Red Clydeside Marxism, the Suffragettes, the Easter rising in Dublin, war profiteering all combine to add spice to the drama which engulfs and overwhelms the social fabric of this small West of Scotland town.

Based on the real-life town of Neilston, the author’s work is influenced by great Scottish writers such as William MacIlvanney Christopher Brookmyre and Iain Banks.

‘I’ve always wondered whether I could write a book. Now that I have the time it was an opportunity not to be missed. Certainly if people enjoy reading Milltown as much as I have enjoyed writing it then I’ll be delighted,’ says Jimmy.

Hailing from Neilston in East Renfrewshire, Scotland, Jimmy Higgins spent four years studying English at Queen’s University, Belfast in the Seventies at the height of the Troubles, before going into teaching. After 30 years talking about books, Jimmy is now turning his hand to writing them – when not playing jazz piano, enjoying the folk scene or pretending to understand the relationship between Gaelic spelling and Gaelic pronunciation!