“From Glasgow Without Love” is a raw, prose collection that captures the city’s pulse through stories of heartbreak, resilience, and working-class grit. It’s a love letter to Glasgow’s shadows, told with fierce honesty and lyrical bite.
From Glasgow Without Love by Albrin Junior
Reviewed by Philo O'fuose
Rating: 4 STARS
This collection of short fiction, curated by acclaimed Scottish based Nigerian writer Albrin Junior, brings together a chorus of voices that reflect Glasgow’s complex emotional terrain. The title itself is a provocation—suggesting not absence of love, but the kind of love forged in hardship, defiance, and survival.
The stories are steeped in the city’s texture: tenement stairwells, chip shops, football chants, and the quiet ache of lives lived between hope and resignation. The stories of this collection are set in Glasgow and Nigeria, giving readers a electric infusion of the cultural and political soul that connects both places.
What makes this collection stand out is its refusal to romanticize. Glasgow is not softened for outsiders. It is rendered in full, with its violence, humour, and tenderness intact. The prose is often spare, but emotionally loaded. Dialogue crackles with authenticity, and characters are drawn with empathy, even when they’re at their most self-destructive.
One standout piece, Deceived, explores a young lady combats her personal demons in a poignant quest for vengeance. Another follows a queer teenager navigating identity and isolation in a city that both shelters and stifles. These stories don’t resolve neatly—they linger, like cigarette smoke in a pub that’s just closed.
From Glasgow Without Love is more than a literary collection, it’s a cultural document. It captures a city in flux, juxtaposed with a sister city thousands of miles away under similar pain points. For readers drawn to fiction that’s emotionally honest, politically aware, and rooted in place, this book is a must-read.
From Glasgow Without Love is available on Amazon and other retailers.