Collation
A novel

Declan Kennedy is an obsessive who writes stories as a coping mechanism.  When he meets Frank Nolan, a troubled eccentric, he feels compelled to invent a biography for the man.  In three parts dealing with adolescence, adulthood and old age, what follows explores the perverse interaction of fantasy and reality in the everyday.  From childhood disconnection to the terrors of mental decline, Frank’s story is intimate and unpredictable, with an acid sense of humour.  Moving across rural Dumfriesshire and Glasgow towards a climax on a mysterious Hebridean island, we follow Frank on a journey of confusion and self-discovery in a changing Scottish landscape.
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Life is a sequence of snapshots ...

Collation is an existential farce set in contemporary Scotland.
​It makes puerile jokes from the charred remains of biography and the Scottish Gothic.

Life is collation.

snapshots:

"Time passes less rigidly in the countryside, or so it seems. The passage of the sun isn’t broken by the measuring rule of launching chimneys, or high-rise fingers that divide the day. Instead it wallows across a unitary pool of earth, comfortable in its irregularity like the asymmetrical form of a tree. Later in life Francis will live in a city, perhaps cities, speedily fragmenting. Yet as things stand it’s at least possible to imagine a narrative curve for him, rather than a selection of snapshots. Such is the beauty of the rural. Cities encourage a sequencing of moments. Outside the urban centres continuity is more feasible, if still mythic. Flowing like water through time, as long as the fields lie quiet."

"No life is a single, coherent mass.  They are messy, collaborative efforts that contain many versions of us.  There are slips and episodes of plagiarism, when others poke through into our narratives.  There are gaps and absurd passages, beside moments of improvisation."

"As strange as it was to admit, her presence was felt the most when the pain was worst."
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"This is the problem with writing yourself.  The future is always uncertain. The future has a tendency to slide into the fantastical and the silly. The future is always wrong, always almost exactly wrong."