Published in 2020
400 pages
Kirstin Innes is an award-winning journalist and arts worker who lives in the west of Scotland. Fishnet, her debut novel, was published in 2015, and won The Guardian Not The Booker Prize. Her short stories have been published in a number of anthologies and recorded for BBC Radio 4, and she’s had short plays performed at Tron Theatre and The Arches in Glasgow. Her journalism has been published in The Independent, The Scotsman, Scotland on Sunday and The Herald, and she was assistant editor of The List magazine between 2006-2010. Kirstin won the Allen Wright Award for Excellence in Arts Journalism in 2007 and 2011.
What is this book about?
Three days before her fifty-first birthday, Clio Campbell – one-hit-wonder, political activist, life-long-love and one-night-stand – kills herself in her friend Ruth’s spare bedroom. And, as practical as she is, Ruth doesn’t know what to do. Or how to feel. Because knowing and loving Clio Campbell was never straightforward.
To Neil, she was his great unrequited love. He’d known it since their days on picket lines as teenagers. Now she’s a sentence in his email inbox: Remember me well.
The media had loved her as a sexy young starlet, but laughed her off as a ranting spinster as she aged. But with news of her suicide, Clio Campbell is transformed into a posthumous heroine for politically chaotic times.
Stretching over five decades, taking in the miners’ strikes to Brexit and beyond; hopping between a tiny Scottish island, a Brixton anarchist squat, the bloody Genoa G8 protests, the poll tax riots and Top of the Pops, Scabby Queen is a portrait of a woman who refuses to compromise, told by her friends and lovers, enemies and fans.
As word spreads of what Clio has done, half a century of memories, of pain and of joy are wrenched to the surface. Those who loved her, those who hated her, and those that felt both ways at once, are forced to ask one question: Who was Clio Campbell?
