Book review / The Young Team, by Graeme Armstrong

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Book review: The Young Team, by Graeme Armstrong

The French, of course, have a good phrase for the phenomenon – nostalgie de la boue. I’ve often wondered how I would translate this, and I suppose “hankering after the manky” might be the closest I have 
come.

It is a strange concept, since it cuts both ways. On one hand it is a form of “poverty tourism”, where the higher classes indulge, at a distance, in descriptions of the ways of the lower classes. But it is also a genuine kind of nostalgia, where those who have broken out of a cycle of their designated station still feel a tug back towards their ain kind. The Young Team seems to exemplify this paradox. It is a novel which I feel many people will make their minds up over on scanning the first page, and some will be enthralled and some will be nauseated.

 

‘My reading pile is turning into a Jenga tower’: Graeme Armstrong in Airdrie, where he grew up. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod

Interview

Graeme Armstrong: ‘When I stopped taking drugs, I felt a kind of loneliness’

The debut novelist on how to write violence, taking the same advice as Irvine Welsh, and his love of Goosebumps

Alex Preston

Saturday 22 February 2020

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raeme Armstrong, 28, grew up in Airdrie, east of Glasgow. He was involved with gang culture from a young age. Expelled from school in his mid-teens, he transferred to Coatbridge high school, and went on to study English literature at Stirling University. The Young Team, his first novel, is a raw and lyrical Bildungsroman that traces the life of Azzy Williams, a smart, secretly sensitive boy growing up in a rough Scottish town where he is drawn to gangs, drugs and crime. The book is written in a voice that recalls Irvine Welsh and Alan Warner – dialect that fizzes off the page.