Needles and Skins, by Sam Stilton

Based throughout, on the true stories of those happy and not so happy souls; who populated the less salubrious Govan, Maryhill and Gorbals; the urban hinterlands of Scotland’s darker side of Glasgow life.

Rarely have people been delivered up to such challenges by uncaring fate. For some there is no way out. They are consumed. For others the Gorbals maws will be avoided, but at what price?

It is an environment where young mothers, desperate to feed their children, offer sordid sex in return for a small return from their social security allowance. Commonplace: the exchange of sordid encounters for the next spliff.

Exposed are acts of gratuitous violence in a hell where the man who keeps order carries a knuckleduster and keep his trouser flies open.

It is a no holds barred grim trail that leaves the reader aching from the nightmare vision of murder, gang rape, drug abuse, paedophilia, casual violence and theft; The theft of every last vestige of human dignity.