How Late It Was, How Late

How Late It Was, How Late is a novel by the Scottish writer James Kelman, published in 1994. It won the Booker Prize that year, and it is written as a stream of consciousness in working-class Glasgow dialect.

Sammy wakes in a lane one morning after a two-day drinking binge and gets into a fight with plain-clothes policemen, who are called sodjers in the local speech. When he regains consciousness he works out, gradually, that he has been beaten severely and that he can no longer see anything at all.

The novel follows him from there. He is released and goes home, finds that his girlfriend Helen has gone and assumes she left because of the argument they had before he went out, and makes no attempt to look for her. Much of the book is the ordinary difficulty of a blind man in a city: working out where he is, finding something that will tell other people what has happened to him, and arguing with a bureaucracy that does not believe him.