T he prose in Tom Newlands’ debut novel is glorious, managing the feat of being both muscular and airy at the same time. But it is first and foremost the landscape that he stakes out that grabs you by the throat. Only Here, Only Now is set amid the “rubbly ground”, “brambles and bins”, discarded syringes and “stamped on cans” of the fictional Muircross, a gritty, grotty post-industrial town on Scotland’s Firth of Forth.
The year is 1994 and the mood in Muircross is hopeless: the pits have closed, and nothing has moved in to replace them. For 14-year-old Cora, though, the outlook is somewhat different. She has no love for the town she’s lived her life in – as far as she can see, it’s “a manky wee hellhole sat out by itself on a lump of coast the shape of a chicken nugget, surrounded by pylons and filled with moonhowlers and old folk and seagulls the size of ironing boards that shat over everything”.
But she’s far from hopeless; she’s full of dreams. She wants college, and Glasgow, and a flat of her own. She wants a life that’s going somewhere.
She wants out. Cora’s drive comes in part from the restlessness and rebellion that possess most teenagers, even when it’s the case that “round here, you lived in your town, and then you died in your town”. But Cora, we discover, isn’t like most teenagers; not exactly.
She can’t sit still; her thoughts fizz and skitter, and “jump 10 chapters ahead at a million miles an hour”. She’s seen th.
