Mayflies by Andrew O’Hagan review / A bittersweet tale of friendship

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Mayflies by Andrew O’Hagan review – a bittersweet tale of friendship

From a boys’ wild weekend to fortysomething crisis … male fragility falls under the spotlight in a novel of two halves

Elizabeth Lowry
Sat 12 Sep 2020 07.30 BST

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here’s a nod to Alan Sillitoe’s classic about postwar working-class life, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) – and the 1960 film starring Albert Finney – in Andrew O’Hagan’s ebulliently dark novel about a group of Ayrshire lads coming of age in Thatcher’s Britain. Twenty-year-old Tully Dawson, a machinist in the local factory who “impersonated Arthur Seaton … by taunting his boss all week and drinking pints of Black and Tan all weekend” is the wisecracking ringleader of this gang. He’s Finney with spiked-up hair and a record collection: where the angry young men of the 50s just had the pub, the angry young men of the 80s have post-punk rock.

My hero / Nadine Gordimer by Gillian Slovo

Nadine Gordimer

My hero: Nadine Gordimer

Gillian Slovo remembers how her fellow South African author's passion for the truth was coupled with a brilliant sense of humour

Plus tributes from JM Coetzee, Justin Cartwright and Elizabeth Lowry

Gillian Slovo, JM Coetzee, Justin Cartwright and Elizabeth Lowry
Sat 19 Jul 2014 08.45 BST

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he first time I met Nadine Gordimer as an adult was after she won the Nobel prize for literature in 1991. I had heard of her ferocious reaction when anyone dared change a word, or even a comma, of her work, so I expected her to have self-confidence and a sharp tongue. But it had never occurred to me that she would be so funny.