Rodge is the author of the following books published since 2005: No Fireworks, Hope for Newborns, Bring Me the Head of Ryan Giggs, Alasdair Gray: A Secretary’s Biography, LoveSexTravelMusik: Stories for the EasyJet Generation, Dougie’s War, Michel Faber: The Writer & his Work, and most recently, Joshua in the Sky: A Blood Memoir (Taproot Press, 2024).
Each book has a dedicated space on this page, with a link to buy the book, selected press and quotes from around the time of publication, various cover art, and summaries of the works.
Michel Faber: The Writer and his Work (published August, 2023).
MICHEL FABER: THE WRITER & HIS WORK was published by Liverpool University Press in hardback on August 1st 2023. You can buy the book at a 20% discount here. A new expanded paperback is available as of September 1st 2025.
Reviews of the book include:
‘A brilliant, well-researched and accessible study.’
The Scotsman
‘Glass is well equipped to examine [Faber]’s somewhat unusual and interesting career… a critical work enriched by conversation and correspondence with its subject.’
Allan Massie, The Scotsman
‘What you see in these pages is, with careful scholarship and attentiveness – and thanks, no doubt, to a lengthy email correspondence with Faber himself – one mind working out the expansively imaginative dimensions of another.’
David Robinson, Books from Scotland
‘This volume offers an engaging and insightful overview of Michel Faber’s writing. Combining archival material and correspondence with close readings, Glass provides the best current introduction to Faber’s diverse body of work, with analysis and background that will fascinate both new readers and experts. This is a witty, thoughtful book that deserves a wide readership.’
Timothy C. Baker, Personal Chair in Contemporary and Scottish Literature, University of Aberdeen, and author of Reading My Mother Back
The Bottle Imp’s review recently said this of the book:
‘Readers new to Faber or engaging with criticism on his writing for the first time will find plenty of insight into overarching themes across his multi-genre and multi-form fiction. For more dedicated fans and academics, Glass’s engagement with never-before-seen materials is fresh and exciting. What most makes Michel Faber a worthwhile read, however, is the strong appreciation for Faber and his work that shines through. For all its discussions of alienation and the alien, this is a very human book, brimming with compassion.’ You can read the full review here.
MICHEL FABER was Book of the Month for August 2023 at Books from Scotland. You can find a detailed review here.
Publisher’s Blurb for MICHEL FABER: THE WRITER & HIS WORK
The first ever detailed assessment of Michel Faber’s life and work across genre and form, from the award-winning novelist, short story writer and biographer of Glaswegian polymath Alasdair Gray, Rodge Glass. This book draws on intimate, detailed interviews with the author over a two-year period and explores as-yet-unseen archives, both the Canongate Books archives and Faber’s own personal home archive, to bring fresh perspectives to light. Glass includes detailed interrogations of unpublished works, including an as-yet-unseen novel, Photograph of Jesus, as well as providing deep dives into Faber’s most celebrated works such as Under the Skin and The Crimson Petal and the White. Known for his hybrid creative-critical approach, Glass uses Faber’s interest in generosity and compassion in writing as a focus for this study, assessing each of his hugely various works by ‘World’, ranging across poetry, the short story, novels and novellas to make an argument for Faber as a writer who has consistently sought to explore narrow emotional territory, that of the human instinct to seek connection with others, even if genuine connection seems unlikely or impossible. Glass draws on individual case studies across Faber’s hugely diverse genre work in a way that will be interesting for fans, as well as informative for students of Faber’s work.
Endorsements:
“Glass takes an author who resists easy categorisations or a simple analysis by chronology, and embraces that, examining Michel Faber’s oeuvre by ‘world’ and highlighting the common thread of compassion throughout them all. Illuminating and enriching, this is the perfect book for Faber fans.”
Ever Dundas, author of HellSans and Goblin
“There were so many ‘ah-hah’ moments in Rodge Glass’s masterful overview of Michel Faber’s work. He takes that singularly disparate oeuvre and teases out the themes that run through the hearts of each book: connection, alienation and a deep, deep compassion. It made me want to go back and start reading Faber all over again from the start.”
Mat Osman, author of The Ghost Theatre and The Ruins
‘A rigorous, fascinating, illuminating work, which shines a new light on Faber’s manner of writing and the themes he tackles in his books. I felt like someone was handing me those books with the pages delicately opened, to invite me to engage with them in a way I hadn’t before.’
Heather Parry, author of Orpheus Builds a Girl
‘This volume offers an engaging and insightful overview of Michel Faber’s writing. Combining archival material and correspondence with close readings, Glass provides the best current introduction to Faber’s diverse body of work, with analysis and background that will fascinate both new readers and experts. This is a witty, thoughtful book that deserves a wide readership.’
Professor Timothy C. Baker, University of Aberdeen, and author of Reading My Mother Back
‘How to contain a writer as sinuous and otherworldly as Michel Faber? Glass cleverly approaches the task by grouping Faber’s work into various ‘worlds’, which allows us to see the repetition, indeed the consistency of themes, juxtaposed with the radically different tones, textures and genres Faber uses to explore them. This insightful study is must-read for readers and writers alike, reflecting the compassion and consideration Faber deploys in his creative process, and shining a light on our eternal search for connection.’
Karen Campbell, author of The Sounds of the Hours and Paper Cup
Review At Books from Scotland:
‘Read MICHEL FABER and you start to realise how clumsy any chronological saunter through Faber’s work would have been, and how themes of alienation, connection and compassion leach through all of it, from short stories to novellas and doorstop novels. Read it, and not only are all the details you have forgotten about Michel Faber’s fiction suddenly brought back into focus, but now, for the first time, you are seeing them all at once. What a beautiful work of art his mind is.’
‘Thoughtful and brave… bleakly humorous and moving.’
Times Literary Supplement
No Fireworks was Rodge’s first novel, published in trade paperback by Faber & Faber in 2005, then in paperback in 2006. The novel was shortlisted for four awards: The Authors’ Club First Novel Award, The Saltire First Novel Award, The Dylan Thomas Prize and the Glen Dimplex First Book Award (Ireland). It was published for the first time as an ebook in 2015.
‘A fine debut novel: highly readable and hinting at even better to come.’
The Herald
No Fireworks in brief – from the Faber site:
Abe Stone is a 61 year old alcoholic with a Henry VIII fixation going through his third divorce. When he starts receiving letters from his dead mother, Evelyn, he is thrown into a late-stage identity crisis. His fourteen-year old grand-daughter, Lucille, is expelled from school and the couple embark on a quest to work out what Evelyn is trying to impart and how Abe can begin to put his dishevelled life in order. No Fireworks is a compelling, funny and poignant story about eight extraordinary days in the life of an ordinary man who can no longer put off answering the big questions: ‘what do I believe in? Where do I belong? Why is my dead mother sending me letters from beyond the grave?’
More Praise for No Fireworks:
‘A wonderful debut by a writer we will certainly be hearing more from. Touching, funny and compelling.’ Louise Welsh, author of The Cutting Room
‘Glass has jumped on the Jewish bandwagon…even your house plants will work out what happens at the end.’
The Daily Telegraph
‘A superb debut novel…Like the best tragic comedies, it is written with a pin-sharp sense of character, isn’t afraid to take swings at the deepest subjects and can spin between the two modes at will.’
The Scotsman
You can buy No Fireworks here.
Hope for Newborns: a novel (2008)
‘Glass has written a compassionate and quietly comic study of a country which has forgotten how to take pride in itself…Some novels deliberately courts our applause. This one doesn’t.’
Guardian
Hope for Newborns was Rodge’s second novel, first published by Faber & Faber in trade paperback in 2008, then in paperback in 2009, and reissued in 2016.
‘A novel about family, responsibility, culture and community. Glass’s characterisation is excellent.’
Independent
Hope for Newborns in brief – from the Faber site:
Twenty-nine-year-old Lewis’s family are the definition of dysfunctional: his brothers, living estranged and unknown lives in Texas and Toronto, his mother, confined in her self-imposed silent state in a room full of fish and amphibians and his father, at work in the Victory Barber Shop where customers are surrounded by souvenirs of wartime Europe. And Lewis, caught between working at a recruitment agency, helping his father out in the barbers and keeping his mother in touch with world news.
But when he receives an email out of the blue from Christy, an old school friend, he is intrigued by her society for Hope for Newborns. Compared with the murkiness of home, the promises of her manifesto – freedom through friendship and love through sacrifice – appear so luminous, and the chance of romance so tangible.
More praise for Hope for Newborns:
‘Every once in a while, a book will come along that has the power to linger in the imagination – to keep gnawing away at you hours and days after you put it down. Such is the case with Hope for Newborns.’ Scotsman
‘Glass confirms he is an original and intriguing literary voice as well as a subtle and thoughtful writer.’ Big Issue
Alasdair Gray: A Secretary’s Biography (non-fiction, 2008)
‘Glass is Gray’s perfect biographer’
The Guardian
Alasdair Gray: A Secretary’s Biography was Rodge’s first non-fiction work. It was shortlisted for the Scottish Arts Council Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award in 2009 and won a Somerset Maugham Award the same year. The book was published in hardback by Bloomsbury in 2008 and in an expanded, updated paperback edition in 2009. It has recently gone into a new edition.
You can buy Alasdair Gray: A Secretary’s Biography and read an extract of the book at the Bloomsbury website here.
‘A strange and nourishing stew’
Time Magazine
‘Few biographers have ever come so close to their subject…a successful and appealing book.’
Karl Miller, Times Literary Supplement
From the Bloomsbury paperback blurb:
Alasdair Gray, author of the modern classics Lanark, Poor Things and 1982, Janine, is without doubt Scotland’s greatest living novelist. Since trying (unsuccessfully) to buy him a drink in 1998, Rodge Glass, first tutee, then secretary to the author and latterly a novelist in his own right, now takes on the role of biographer, charting Gray’s life from unpublished and unrecognised son of a box-maker to septuagenarian ‘little grey deity’ as Will Self has called him. A modern-day Boswell to Gray’s Johnson, Glass seamlessly weaves a chronological narrative of his subject’s life into his own diary of meeting, getting to know and working with the artist, writer and campaigner, to create a vibrant and wonderfully textured portrait of the artist as a remarkable old man.
More praise for Alasdair Gray: A Secretary’s Biography –
‘Intelligent and warm-hearted’ Jonathan Coe
‘Alasdair Gray is spectacularly eccentric…this book will delight the many devotees of the Gray cult’ Financial Times
‘A work just as original and quirky as its subject’ Metro
‘Honest and revealing, tender and, very unacademically, moving’ The Herald
‘Glass has produced a portrait that is critically intimate to the point of being genuinely, unashamedly loving’ Prospect Magazine
Dougie’s War: A Soldier’s Story – with Dave Turbitt (2010)
Blurb for Dougie’s War:
Dougie Campbell is a Scottish soldier, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan returning home to the south side of Glasgow. He has just left the British Army but cannot forget his experiences of combat. A battle rages inside him as he struggles to adjust to civilian life, trying to live with his memories and understand his need for recognition. As the pressure builds, those closest to him try to intervene, but Dougie has already chosen another path…
A fictional story, but based on meticulously researched real life experiences of Scottish veterans, Dougie’s War shows that the fight doesn’t end when men and women leave military service. Dougie’s War is inspired by the classic and highly influential 80s World War 1 comic strip Charley’s War, the first to explore the reality of war and what was then called shell shock. Key extracts from Charley’s War are included here, together with moving interviews with veterans of conflicts in the Falklands, former Yugoslavia, the first Gulf War, Iraq and Afghanistan. Photos are included from Afghanistan taken by Sargeant Nick Collins, and an essay on PTSD by Adrian Searle is included too.
‘…throughout the book Dave Turbitt finds effective ways to illustrate the sheer psychic disruption of PTSD, the sudden intrusion of nightmares into waking life. His most powerful images find a minimal modernism for Joe Colquhoun’s expressionism…’
Scottish Review of Books
‘A highly unusual novel with graphics… like the writing, the artwork is excellent’
Sunday Express
More praise for Dougie’s War:
A hard-hitting tale about Post-traumatic Stress Disorder… it hammers home its message without being preachy… as forceful as any conventional novel or non-fiction account’
The Big Issue
‘Its attempt to be honest, without being sensational or voyeuristic about the tragedy of war, is a successful one’
Sunday Herald
‘Raises questions about the validity of the wars our country is conducting and, particularly, the effect these conflicts have on those involved’
The Spectator
Bring Me the Head of Ryan Giggs: a novel (2012)
Bring Me the Head of Ryan Giggs
‘A complex and moving portrayal of obsession, football and heroes with boots of clay. Rodge Glass warps sincerity with an ironist’s ear – great stuff’
Will Self
Bring Me the Head of Ryan Giggs was Rodge’s third novel. It was first published in trade paperback by Tindal Street Press in 2012, then in paperback by Serpent’s Tail in paperback in 2013.
Bring Me the Head... in brief – from Serpent’s Tail’s site:
Mark Wilson’s whole life has been about the moment when he steps on to Old Trafford to make his first appearance for Man Utd. But when a wayward pass from Ryan Giggs leads to THE WORST DEBUT EVER, Mark’s schoolboy obsession with him develops into something more dangerous.
Fifteen years later, after a career interrupted by drinking, injury, gambling, RESTRAINING ORDERS and burglary, Mark is now sober, gainfully-employed and looking forward to watching United at their CHAMPIONS LEAGUE-WINNING BEST. Most importantly for Mark, he is reconciled with the mother of his son, little Ryan. But as the old urges continue to struggle for voice in his head, can he keep his eye on the goal?
‘Drawing on an impressive fund of United trivia, Glass views a great team from the perspective of the (fictional) runt of the litter.’
The Guardian
More praise for Bring Me the Head of Ryan Giggs:
‘A gripping rollercoaster ride through the nature of obsession and the unregarded lives of football failures’
Daily Mail
A unique idea: an unhinged obsessive failure from Manchester United’s Class of ’92 blames Giggs for his demise and plots vengeance’
Four Four Two
‘A very good comic writer’
Independent on Sunday
You can buy Bring Me the Head of Ryan Giggs in ebook here or in print here
LoveSexTravelMusik: Stories for the EasyJet Generation (short fiction, 2013)
Rodge Glass 