The book focuses on the characters presented in these photographs, which span post-war Scotland across geographies and social classes from the homeless to senior politicians.

For The Independent, the “dizzying grand opus” was “eminently readable” and successful in showcasing “an alternative history of the country told by its everyday people instead of its movers and shakers”.

[2] The Observer said that Robertson had “caught something of the sheer bloody-minded craving for self-sabotage in the Scottish soul so accurately it's painful”.

[4] The Daily Telegraph was impressed by the book’s ability to meld “engrossing individual storylines” with “cultural shifts such as the birth of Scottish nationalism, the death of industry, the sexual revolution and the boom in North Sea oil”.

[6] Writing in The Guardian, the writer Irvine Welsh said of the "highly ambitious" book that it “represents nothing less than a landmark for the novel in Scotland, and underlines the author's position as one of Britain's best contemporary novelists”.