Rhona Cameron - 1979: A Big Year in a Small Town Book

1979 takes place in a small fishing town called Musselburgh, situated on the east coast of Scotland. An evocative, moving and at times hilarious true-life story about growing up gay in a small town, finding out you're adopted, and losing your father at the age of fourteen.

Always an outsider, the Rhona of 1979 was desperate to fit in at any cost, and here lies the bittersweet humour. At the heart of the book is the Clubhouse, a place that symbolises all that is normal, happy, and secure. And behind the club, outside, Rhona and her friends are smoking, fighting, kissing and drinking.

In this darkly funny and deeply biographical first book, Rhona Cameron takes us back to a year when everything seemed to change. A new British government came to power, the Eighties were approaching and at times life felt so precarious that it really looked like she and her family might never make it through the next year, let alone the next decade.

'A candid, open-hearted memoir...startling'
The Observer

'Wickedly amusing'
The Times

'Utterly absorbing'

The Mirror

'Funny, painful, sad and true, this wistful teenage testimony isn't just a memoir of a particular time and place, it's also a universal elegy about how it really feels to be a young outsider of any and every sort.'
The Guardian

'Eccentric, feisty and very funny'
Jenny Eclair, The Guardian