The south side isn't just a location, a neighbourhood, an area on a city map. In these brilliantly perceptive novellas, all set in Glasgow, it stands for the flip-side of the psyche, the darkness behind the facade. The title story, The South Side, with its echoes of the Bible John murders, finds Matthew, newly widowed and remarried, glimpsing and trying to deny events from his past which he has repressed for years. Machinery deals compassionately with an elderly woman whom others might describe as a neighbour from hell. The magical realism of Below takes Belle, a feisty bag-lady, on a phantasmagorical trip through present and past in search of a lost village under the city, or perhaps in search of herself. (Belle is a recurrent character in Moira Burgess's writing, and her companion Pat Brady features in the novel The Day Before Tomorrow, recently republished by Kennedy & Boyd.) After you read these novellas, neither the streets of Glasgow nor the people in them will ever look quite the same again. Moira Burgess is a novelist, short story writer and literary historian, born in Campbeltown, Argyll, and now living in Glasgow.
Writing has been the most important part of her life since childhood and she has published two novels, The Day Before Tomorrow (1971, reprinted 2009) and Speak, Adam (published in 1987 as A Rumour of Strangers, reprinted 2009). For some years she worked mainly on non-fiction, publishing The Glasgow Novel: a bibliography (3rd edition 1999) and a book on the same topic, Imagine a City (1998). Author of Mitchison's Ghosts, a study of the supernatural and mythical elements in the work of Naomi Mitchison, she is now working on an edition of Mitchison's collected prose.