THE CROW ROAD was published in 1992
It was adapted for television by the BBC in 1996.
Prentice McHoan is full of questions.
Will the long-limbed, golden-haired Verity ever notice him? Wil his odiously talented brother Lewis make it as a stand-up comic? Will his father ever speak to him again? Will his mother ever forgive him? Will uncle Hamish’s newly-minted religion stand the test of time? Does Ashley Watt know it was he who broke her nose with a snowball when she was a kid? Did Grandma Margot have to fall through the conservatory roof? What is Aunt Ilsa doing in Patagonia? Is there a God? Why does Uncle Fergus never use the observatory he built back in 1974? Will he ever get rid of this hangover? And is Uncle Rory still alive somewhere, or is he ‘away the Crow Road’?
Prentice has returned to the bosom of his complex but enduring Scottish family and though full of questions about the McHoan past, present and future, he is mostly deeply preoccupied with death, sex, drink and illegal substances...
One reviewer wrote... ‘The Crow Road has become one of those rare and special things, a ‘talked about’ book. Those who have read it feel the need to communicate their pleasure and satisfaction; those who have not read it feel the need to pretend they have. The story is set in contemporary Scotland and possesses a plot that gloriously defies genre and category. Bizarre deaths, broken love affairs, tenuous and tortured families, cryptic diaries and mysterious disappearances. All of this is dipped in memorable prose and sweetened with a gift for descriptions of bucolic landscape, a stimulating control of humour and often quite sepulchral wit. The book is initiated, for example, with “It was the day my grandmother exploded. I sat in the crematorium, listening to my Uncle Hamish quietly snoring in harmony to Bach’s Mass in B Minor, and I reflected that it always seemed to be death that drew me back to Gallanach.”’
Iain said, “I was pleased with it in the end, even though structurally it’s all over the place, a rag-bag of a thing. I like the characters in The Crow Road, especially Prentice, and, as my editor pointed out two days ago, ‘you always fall in love with your women characters, don’t you, Banksie? And it always shows, as well.’ Oops!”
In 1995, actor John Gordon Sinclair chose two books of Iain’s for his Classics, Espedair St and The Crow Road.
The Crow Road was adapted for television by the BBC in 1996. Written by Bryan Elsley and directed by Gavin Millar, it starred Joe McFadden, Bill Paterson, Peter Capaldi, Valerie Edmond, David Robb and Dougray Scott. It was nominated for a Royal Television Society award and for nine Baftas, going on to win four Bafta Scotland awards.
In 2017, Little, Brown published a special 25th Anniversary edition.
In early 2024 The Book Ferret in Arundel, West Sussex was renamed The Crow Road Bookshop by owner James Doyle, in honour of Iain and his work.
He said, “It’s a sort of mystery but told through the eyes of this guy Prentice, who is a slightly awkward and rather gauche character, brilliantly well observed and again it’s full of Scottish humour. I would quite like to read it again and there’s not many novels I can say that about. I cried at the end of The Crow Road – because of the ending but also because I’d finished it. I remember it also made me feel quite homesick because some of it is based in Glasgow and some is in the Highlands and there is that kind of humour that I think is particularly Scottish.”