Patrick Doyle is a 29-year-old teacher in an ordinary school. Frustrated and increasingly bitter at the system he is employed to maintain, Patrick begins his rebellion, fuelled by drink and his passionate, unrequited love for a fellow teacher. A Disaffection (1989) is the apparently straightforward story of one week in a man’s life in which he decides to change the way he lives. Under the surface, however, lies a brilliant and complex examination of class, human culture and character written with irony, tenderness, and enormous anger. Above all, it expresses the brutal honesty that has marked James Kelman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Kelman and http://literature.britishcouncil.org/james-kelman) as one of the most noted writers in contemporary Britain.
Follow up an interest in Kelman with Simon Kovesi’s James Kelman (1977, http://www.amazon.co.uk/James-Kelman-Contemporary-British-Novelists/dp/0719070961/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1387035767&sr=8-1 ) in The Contemporary British Novelists series.
352 pages in Vintage paperback edition
ISBN 978-0099283096
James Kelman