[1] He attended Oban High School,[2] and his interest in reading was sparked when he was fifteen, after he bought three novels whose covers suggested stories with a sexual dimension: Charles Webb's The Graduate, André Gide's The Immoralist and Albert Camus' The Outsider.
He explained in an interview with the Scottish Review of Books in 2011: "I had presumed novels were an art form which only happened elsewhere and had died out in Scotland around the time of Walter Scott.
On the other hand, I could argue this was because local bookshops were stuffed with Scott and not a single work of modern Scottish literature."
He then spent some time participating in the Spanish rave scene, before working in Scotland as a train driver's assistant, musician and barman.
[4] Since then he has published The Man Who Walks (2002), an imaginative and surreal black comedy; The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven (2006), which imagines the reminiscences of a sickly Spanish playboy;The Stars in the Bright Sky (2010), a sequel to The Sopranos; The Deadman's Pedal (2012), a coming-of-age novel set in 1973-4; Their Lips Talk of Mischief (2015), a comedy about two aspiring writers in Thatcher's Britain; and Kitchenly 434 (2021), a comedic satire set in the 1970s about a British rock star and the caretaker of his country house retreat.
A play by Lee Hall, Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour, was based on The Sopranos and premiered in 2015, directed by Vicky Featherstone and featuring live songs.