Nineteen seventy-nine: a big year in a small town

R. Cameron

Nineteen Seventy-nine takes place in a small fishing town called Musselburgh, situated on the east coast of Scotland. It's about a young girl who is very naive yet incredibly self-aware in the year that changed her life forever - 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 14. 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. Sons with their fathers; 15 year-old boys with their girlfriends for their first underage drink. Wives with their husbands for the Christmas disco. 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.