James Kelman has failed to deny that this unrelenting and boundaryless narrative unleashes one more unwelcome alien subversive unto the world.

For twelve years the immigrant Jeremiah Brown has wandered the United States living a new life in the old ways. Now caught in mid South Dakota on the eve of a chaotic money-saving return deal ?home? to Scotland. He wanders out for a last beer. It leads to another, and another, amid strange encounters with a bunch of weirdly normal regulars, figments of a deluded AI self image, premised on the need to confront an imposed reality of community displacement, intellectual stagnation, and an imagination stunted by a system that bonds insiders and outsiders in a scary shitswamp birthed by the firewall thud of pre-Enlightenment appeals to an uncaring Providence.